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Chapter 1 summarizes the modern scholarly opinion that throughout its history, the Zen tradition rejected religious ritual as a legitimate means of carrying out its unique Buddhist mission, and subjects this view to a contemporary historical critique. The author's thesis is that modern Japanese Zen scholars constructed the anti‐ritual theme in Zen in order to make Zen more relevant to the modern age in the eyes of both the ruling elite in Meiji/Taisho Japan and Western intellectuals who tended to be dismissive of religious ritual. Pushed in this direction by their own historical circumstances, modern Zen scholars portrayed the entire Zen tradition as anti‐ritual in basic intent and practice in spite of the historical record that belies this view. The author proceeds to describe the history of Zen ritual and presents a catalog description of ritual activities that are practiced in contemporary Sōtō Zen.

This chapter examines how legal pluralism and extraterritoriality contributed to shape the public debate in China and Japan in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It contrasts official Chinese and Japanese responses to a series of widely publicized consular courts cases and shows that the Japanese authorities were much more successful in mobilizing public opinion against extraterritoriality than the Qing Empire was. The chapter argues that one of the reasons for the Japanese success was the fact that the Japanese state had created a relatively unified citizenry by abolishing all traces of legal pluralism.

This chapter argues that prior to the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, both Qing China and Tokugawa Japan were familiar with the principle of personal jurisdiction and the existence of ethnic and social groups that had separate legal existences prior to the Opium War. In the Qing legal order, the Manchu conquest élite enjoyed extensive legal privileges, which placed them outside the criminal jurisdiction of the local Chinese administration. Similarly, the Tokugawa shogunate was accustomed to devolving jurisdiction to local domains and different status groups.

Kōbudaigakkō's zōka course was only one of a number of sites constructing new archi-technical models for Meiji Japan. Compromise within daiku culture had actually begun under the Tokugawa regime, and by the time zōkagaku arrived was even taking on the characteristics of a creole — a pidgin that moves from being strictly a language of trade between foreigners to one used in domestic communication. By the late 1870s ɀōkagaku came to define “architecture.” Yet “architecture”had as yet no monopoly on imagining Western-style governmental and factory buildings.

This chapter examines the views of Japanese politician Katō Hiroyuki about nature. It explains that in 1881 Hiroyuki turned decidedly in favor of autocratic control, relying in large part on Social Darwinism, and that he claimed that oligarchic rule was the correct form of government for Meiji Japan according to the dictates of natural evolution. The chapter discusses the opposition of Baba Tatsui, Ueki Emori, and others who found in nature a tool against Hiroyuki and against oligarchic power, and suggests that the 1881–1883 debate was a contest over definitions of nature, with all sides seeking to assert nature as they defined it.

This chapter addresses the “birth” of hygienic modernity as Meiji physician-bureaucrats used the term weisheng to convey a philosophy that linked the health of the individual to the health of the nation. It specifically reviews the specific textual influences, the circulations between Japan and Europe, and the significant linguistic choices that went into the process of developing hygienic modernity in Japan. Nagayo Sensai outlined an ideal vision of hygienic modernity for Japan. Eisei shinron renames the relationship between the natural world and the human body using the vocabularies of chemistry, physiology, and anatomy. Eisei implied that national survival was the ultimate purpose of disease prevention. Zhibao would not be unique in the turn-of-the-century world for maintaining conflicting views on the etiology of cholera. In the twentieth century, eisei as hygienic modernity would become a foundational element in the creation of the Japanese empire.

This chapter traces the genesis of baseball in Japan and its diffusion during the Meiji period. Evidence suggests that baseball played in Japan put the genesis of the game in the nation's capital in 1872 with Horace E. Wilson identified as the pioneer instructor. In Meiji Japan, baseball had established a dedicated following among Japanese adolescents who received education in Gilded Age America. By the end of the nineteenth century, America's national pastime blossomed into a transoceanic pastime fostered in multiple networks built and sustained by aspiring Americans and Japanese.

Cultural attitudes rooted in the Tokugawa-era status system (mibunsei) provided an interpretive framework for the race-based hostility Meiji-era Japanese encountered in the United States and Canada, informing the discursive strategies of Meiji diplomats who sought to refute the claims of anti-Japanese exclusionists by distinguishing Japanese labor migrants from themselves, aiding in the reproduction of Japanese as an excludable category when anti-Japanese elements turned their arguments against all Japanese. Concerns about social hierarchy and the significance of historical status categories (mibun), including cultural taboos associated with outcaste status, also mediated the responses of Meiji immigrants to conditions they encountered on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, including white racism and job opportunities. Japanese immigrant negotiations of race and identity in the North American West can be fully understood only by also considering mibun, in addition to more the familiar paradigms of race, class, and gender, in analyzing Meiji-era Japanese immigration history.

This chapter examines the discourse of heroes in Meiji Japan through its principal forms of representation, namely, history and fiction. In many cultures, the ideology of “masculine hegemony” finds cultural expression in the figure of the hero, whose exemplary masculinity compels imitation. The hero is seen as central in the process of identification among adolescent males since the transition to manhood is predicated upon conformity to normative definitions of gender, which heroes are deemed to exemplify. This chapter analyzes the ways in which heroes have shaped gender identity in Japan by focusing on the narratives of historical biographies and adventure novels during the Meiji period. It also considers the tendency of heroism narratives in modern Japan to invoke a popular nationalism that celebrated defiance of state authority. The chapter describes heroes as one kind of transitional object that plays an essential role in the development of identity. It argues that the ideological effect of heroes in shaping gender identity can only be understood in relationship to narrativity.

The ‘European miracle’ needs to be compared to an East Asian development path. In East Asia efficient institutions fostered great use of labour, an ‘industrious revolution’ path entailing extensive use of family labour and systems of double cropping. The result was a ‘labour-intensive industrialization’ such as occurred in Meiji Japan. That labour-intensive path now shapes the centres of most of the world's manufacturing employment, currently situated in East, South-east and South Asia. The challenge for Japan and other East Asian economies has been to develop resource- and energy-saving technologies.

This chapter demonstrates how a thick conception of development necessitates an examination of both law and culture. First, the chapter deals with culture change in Turkey, Japan, and Germany., which postconflict This chapter centers on Japan’s experience, particularly its modernization in the Meiji era. Japan’s drive to modernize involved the active participation of many civic organizations, not just directives issued by a ruler. The chapter also discusses efforts by different countries as well as nongovernmental organizations involved in transnational social movements. The chapter then explores efforts taken in Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These case studies show how actors, mainly the United Nations and United States, have tried to establish legal systems in countries that have recently been embroiled in conflict and unrest. An important element to consider is the effect of security, or rather a lack of security, on forces attempting to implement law and development.

The rules governing international relations in Inner and East Asia changed hugely in the nineteenth century. Asian laws of nations were supplanted under pressures coming from outside, most conspicuously from the West but also from Japan. The resort to violence by Western powers and Asian rulers alike was justified through doctrines of European international law that had evolved so as to remove restraints on European imperialist projects. Asian states scrambled to reorganize along modern, Western lines, and most governments that had ruled them in the nineteenth century were gone by the twentieth, with few exceptions. As new political elites took power, a continent of khans, emperors, hierarchs, and kings became a world of presidents, party leaders, constitutional monarchs, and national assemblies. Interpolity relations underwent a complete conceptual and organizational transformation. Some states, such as Tibet and its Himalayan neighbors, became the objects of competing imperial ambitions, while others, such as Japan, used their new capacities to overturn the hierarchy of earlier relationships, especially with the Qing Great State, and spread their sway over others, notably Korea. Though the older sources of ruler legitimacy and legality did not fully disappear, newer ideologies and rules of interstate relationships largely replaced them.

This book explores the ways in which modern forms of nostalgia become articulated in the language of gender and nation by focusing on Meiji Japan. Beginning with the critique of the Westernized Japanese “gentleman” or shinshi, it examines the cultural dimensions of popular nationalism in modern Japan by analyzing the diverse and popular forms of opposition to the state and relating them to what John Breuilly calls “governmental nationalism.” It also considers how antistate movements defined Japanese national identity and challenges narratives of Japanese history that emphasize the march of progress and the rationalization of everyday life as “disciplining” the nation, along with interpretations that equate the Meiji state with the rise of militarism. In addressing the phenomenon of rapid social change in relation to the construction of gender identity and the invention of national culture in modern Japan, the book uncovers the invention of a shared cultural identity by invoking the myth of an eternal return to timeless notions of gender and nation.

Mishima Michiyoshi, a Japanese pioneer of school hygiene, believed that Japanese children experienced precocious puberty, resulting in underdeveloped and inferior physical stature in comparison to European and American children. This analysis of comparative anatomies interpreted the inferiority of the “Japanese” body as embodiment of its diminutive status in politics and civilizations. This chapter shows how intellectuals, government bureaucrats, school hygienists, and pediatric specialists viewed and interpreted children’s bodies and their physical growth, illustrating the complex interactions between ideals of civilization and gendered norms in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan.

This chapter examines Ueki Emori's thoughts on the relation between nature and politics. It discusses the problems in Emori's radical theory of unmediated bodiliness and describes his attempt to reshape the cosmopolis of Meiji Japan so that both society and individuals would exemplify the perfect liberties of natural law and positive law simultaneously. The chapter argues that Emori supported egalitarian democracy and so distrusted hierarchies of ability or traditional power that he dismissed all aspects of mindful creation in proposing the fundaments of a democratic state.

This chapter examines the emergence of baseball within the changing political landscapes in both Japan and the United States, with an emphasis on the former. In particular, it explores baseball's origins in Japan and how it had come to be accepted during the Meiji era—a time when the nation took on new ideological approaches and sought to modernize and engage with the wider world. Baseball had landed in Japan equipped with all of the proper ingredients—patriotism, industrial productivity, and modernization—to support the reform mentality of the Meiji leaders. Moreover, American promoters of baseball tirelessly reminded potential converts of the game's democratic values. And most importantly, here was a Western activity that seemingly posed no threat to Japanese tradition.

This chapter traces the ideological background of the formation of the idea of kokugo. While the word itself existed before Meiji, kokugo with a modern connotation was a child of modernity born out of the intense determination of Meiji Japan. Tracing its historical origin is a considerable intellectual challenge today when the word kokugo is widely accepted as self-explanatory. Such an intellectual challenge in this chapter starts with examination of the violent potential in the ideology of kokugo, though it also takes the form of an academic critique of the field of kokugogaku (the study of kokugo) as a truism. In fact, both of these approaches are necessary in order to clarify the origin of the ideology of kokugo in history because kokugo has been not only the political apparatus that controls the nation-state, but also the intellectual apparatus that casts a spell over the spirit of modern Japan.