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Opinion Forum
Nationalism, the Vernacular, and Responses toWestern Impact in East Asian Comparative Perspective
Joshua FOGEL*

Since coming to Santa Barbara, my job
description has been “comparative East
Asianist,” rather than historian of China orJapan; as a result, I have had to do a great dealof reading in the histories of the other countries
in the region. Among the many things that havestruck me in this connection over the past few
years are not only how so much of what I
initially learned in Chinese history classes has
startling resonances with the other major areas
influenced by Chinese culture (everybody
knows that), but also how remarkably similar
was the conceptualization of pressing issues inthose countries with China as well as how
much less extraordinary China’s historical experience becomes throughcomparison. The diﬀerences as well as the similarities are thrown in a fascinating relief and potentially tell us much about not only high Chinese culture
but also the social and economic systems in which it found a home.
I am still very much in the process of sorting all this out toward writing
a much longer work in the general area. Here I would like to focus tightly on
two manifestations of the larger problem: the linkage between the rise ofnationalism and the emergence of the vernacular as a literary vehicle; and theEast West mix in the conceptions of modernization. These issues were facedby all four East Asian civilizations and in remarkably similar ways.
* Joshua FOGEL is Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto. The present
article is from his recent book, Between China and Japan: The Writing of Joshua
Fogel (Brill Academic Publishers, 2015). The contents and introduction of the bookare included in the Appendix of this article.

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Let me say just one further thing by way of introduction. I think this sortof comparative analysis, whether or not I do it well, leads us to far more
important and interesting conclusions than does the imposition of all theforeign origin theories that have been sweeping the ﬁeld of late—the infestation has been most grotesque in the Japan ﬁeld in this regard. By the same
token, I want strongly and openly to disassociate myself from the regionalcultural approach that has been applied principally by social scientists using
hypocoristics like NICS and NIES and Paciﬁc Rim and whatever else.
Modernization and the Rise of the Vernacular
Many scholars in East Asia and elsewhere have identiﬁed the rise ofnationalism with the transformations characterized by the modern experience.
Nationalism has usually been seen as a positive force in China, as well as in
Vietnam and Korea, whereas in Japan it has been seen as antecedent toimperialism. I think a more meaningful comparison, which is impossible
here, would start with a level playing ﬁeld and look at Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, and Vietnamese nationalism in comparative terms, examine theirmutual interactions, and look at the consequences of their emergence over theentire course of the 20th century, not just the ﬁrst few decades.
One manifestation of nationalism that can be found in all four East Asian
nations is the rise of the vernacular in its relationship both to literary Chinese
culture (even in China) and to modern political movements. In China the riseof baihua (the vernacular) in the New Culture Movement is usually understood as part of the rising tide of nationalism, demonstrating a concern on thepart of early Chinese radicals to bring culture to the people, and usuallyignoring the fact that China already had traditions of vernacular drama andﬁction that had made major strides several centuries before Hu Shi and Chen
Duxiu claimed to be pioneering it.
Scholars have tended to stress to excess the diﬀerences between baihua
and wenyan(literary Chinese), probably because the latter is so extraordinarily
diﬃcult but in comparison to what readers and writers in the other countries
of East Asia were working with, the diﬀerences recede rapidly. After all, bothbaihua and wenyan are Chinese; they are members of the same language
group; they occupied clearly delineated spheres as languages; and while useof one or the other might raise political or cultural issues, it brought into
question no issues of national or ethnic identity. The eﬀort to bring baihua
into a monopolizing position as linguistic hegemon early in the 20th century
reveals much more a conscious political assault on the elite culture that had
so long used (many diﬀerent varieties of) wenyan to communicate.
In the other countries of East Asia, what had taken one step in China
would require two or more steps. First, a native written language had to beNationalism, the Vernacular, and Responses to Western Impact in East Asian Comparative Perspective

37

invented to compete with the imported literary Chinese—this occurred before
the putative modern period—and later, a written vernacular had to be developed to contest with both the domestic literary language and Chinese. But weshould keep ﬁrmly in mind that, until recent times, Chinese literary culture
was literary culture to a large extent, and even into our own century it
reminded the medium of international discourse within East Asia.
The Japanese were not the ﬁrst people on the Chinese periphery to imbibe
Sinic culture, but they were the ﬁrst to develop their own written language,
the kana syllabaries, in general use among the Heian elite by at least the early
10th century.1
Initially, kana were considered ﬁt only for women and were known also
as onna moji (women’s script), whereas Chinese characters remained the realmof men and were called otoko moji (men’s script). But this distinction wasnever an inseparable divide; high-born women often learned Chinese, andmen did in fact write, on occasion, in kana.
Skipping ahead to the Edo period, we still ﬁnd women primarily writing
in kana and men using both mediums as well as mixtures, though Confucian
scholars often wrote in Kanbun (literary Chinese) or prepared versions of theirwritings in both Kanbun and bungo (literary Japanese), and some evenmanaged to have their Kanbun works circulate in Qing China (as did some
Koreans and Vietnamese). In response to the need for a uniform educational
curriculum taught nationwide in an accessible style, a movement developed
over the course of the 19th century to bring the written Japanese language
into accord with the vernacular. It aroused acrimonious debate. In 1866,
Maejima Hisoka called for the complete abolition of Chinese characters fromJapanese textbooks. In part such calls were eﬀorts to spread education, in part
they reﬂected a rising aspiration for Japan to ﬁnd its own distinctive identity
separate from Sinic culture.2
1 Roy Andrew Miller, The Japanese Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1967), pp.120 21, 124 26.
2 Nanette Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement: Its Origin, Development, andConclusion.” Monumenta Nipponica 33.3 (Autumn 1978), pp.333, 337. See also herbook, Language and the Modern State: the Reform of Written Japanese (London:
Routledge, 1991). The whole picture is muddled, as all historical pictures are, by
the fact the some of the most extreme and aniti-bakufu activists, like Yoshida Shōinand his teacher Sakuma Shōzan were dedicated Kangakusha (scholars of Chinese
learning) who hoped to bring a Japan derailed by a corrupt and inept bakufu backon a proper Confucian course. See Masuda Wataru, Seigaku tōzen to chūgoku jijō:‘zassho sakki’ [The eastern spread of Western learning and conditions in China:
Notes on “Various Books”] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1979), pp.31 46. My English
translation of this marvelous book is being published serially in Sino-JapaneseStudies. For these pages, see Sino-Japanese Studies 3.1 (November 1990), pp.36 46.
Chinese friends have informed me that a Chinese translation is also underway.

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The movement took the name genbun itchi (combining the vernacular andliterary languages). In its initial stages, it emphasized the great value of avernacular in everyday life. Later, in its better known phase, it became themedium for the development of a modern Japanese literature, ﬁrst and foremost in the pioneering vernacular style of Futabatei Shimei, who publishedJapan’s ﬁrst modern novel in 1887.3 For all the many eﬀorts to bring thewritten language into harmony with the vernacular in Japan, though, evenwhen Kanbun was most on the defensive, we see few or no demands for theJapanese people to stop writing Chinese characters altogether because they
were Chinese; Kanji may have come from China, but they had long become
the shared property of all East Asians. We should note as well that this was
precisely the period in which the famous 1000 or more two-character neologisms were being coined in Meiji Japan and imported back into China, an
event that helped create the vernacular Chinese language.4
The Japanese never resorted to Kanbun for ﬁction, perhaps because
Japanese ﬁction owed its origins to women, and women wrote primarily inkana. Of course, the Chinese themselves never developed a sustained tradition of wenyan ﬁction either. But they were not the only countries in East
Asia. There was recently published a seven-volume series titled (in Chinese)
Yuenan Hanwen xiaoshuo congkan. The series represents the bulk of theextant novels written by Vietnamese in literary Chinese, usually based on
Chinese vernacular ﬁction or drama and Vietnamized (by changing place
names, personal names, and settings). Before the Vietnamese developed theirown written language, known as chū’ nôm (or nôm), in the 13th century, andbefore the Koreans invented the han’gŭl alphabet in the 15th century, andindeed well afterward in both cases, both used literary Chinese as the medium
for written ﬁction. A recent Korean scholar’s estimate puts the number of
extant novels written by Koreans in literary Chinese at about 600. In fact, thehigh point of nôm lyric poetry came only in the 18th century, and han’gŭl
literature really dates from the 17th century.5
3 NaneteTwine, “The Genbunitchi Movement,” pp.339, 342, 350, 353 54; George
Sansom, The Western World and Japan (New York: Knopf, 1950), p.403; Andō
Hikotarō, “Miyajima Daihachi to Futabatei Shimei,” in Kindai Nihon to Chūgoku
[Modern Japan and China], ed. Takeuchi Yoshimi and Hashikawa Bunzō (Tokyo:
Asahi shinbun sha, 1974), pp.125 43.
4 Tam Yue-him (Tan Ruqian), “Xiandai Hanyu de Riyu wailaici jiqi souji he bianren
wenti” [Japanese Loanwords in contemporary Chinese and the issues involved incollecting and recognizing them], in his Jindai Zhong-Ri wenhua guanxi yanjiu[Studies in modern Sino-Japanese cultural relations] (Hong Kong: Xianggang Riben
yanjiusuo, 1986), pp.327 49
5 Tanaka Yūko, “‘Nihon Chūgoku Betonamu” [Japan, China, Vietnam], Gekkan Shinika
2.2 (February 1991), pp.8 10.

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39

Koreans developed their own written language much later than theJapanese or the Vietnamese. King Sejong’s explicit purpose in having awritten Korean language devised was to enable his people to express themselves in their everyday lives in a medium of their own, because Chinese, hebelieved, was so diﬃcult for them. The Korean historian Yi Ki-baek has
termed the han’gŭl alphabet “the proudest cultural achievement of the Korean
people.” While the government and the Confucian yangban elite continued touse literay Chinese, many works of a wide variety—including women’s writings–now began to use han’gŭl.6
Traditionalists were never particularly happy with han’gŭl, and han’gŭl
was explicitly used by patriotic groups from the late-19th century as a way tomake their publications accessible to large numbers of people, just as thebaihua movements would attempt several decades later in China. The founderof the Korean vernacular movement Chu Sigyong, aimed at “ending aristocratic cultural slavery to Chinese culture.”7 He was not attacking the Chineseor even their culture but rather the elite in his own society for trying toremain a class apart from and above ordinary Koreans. Past Chinese dynasties may have demanded tribute, but the inferiority complex attached to theidea of sadae (serving the great) was, like the two-character term itself, aKorean innovation. Under the Japanese colonial regime from 1910, only theJapanese language was taught in Korean schools, and thus the thrust of any
movement to keep Korean alive was nationalistic by deﬁnition. With Japan’s
defeat in 1945, the nation returned as a whole to han’gŭl (mixed with
Chinese characters in South Korea, though fewer than in postwar Japan, andsolely han’gŭl in North Korea).
The Vietnamese case hears similarities with Korea and Japan, but
Vietnamese followed an even more tortuous path. I noted that Vietnamese
invented their own written language, nôm, in the 13th century. An individual
nôm character was usually created out of two Chinese characters, giving it theappearance to Chinese-trained eyes of familiarity and strangeness all at once,much like the Xixia script. Nôm was arguably more easily integrated with
Chinese than kana or han’gŭl because, while Japanese and Korean are highlyinﬂected, S-O-V languages, Vietnamese more closely resembles the lack ofinﬂection in Chinese although with an altogether diﬀerent word order. There
was no division of language usage along gender lines, though literary Chinese
6 Ki-baikLee, A New History of Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1984), pp.192 93, 244; Gari Ledyard, “The Korean Language Reform of 1446: The
Origin, Background and Early History of the Korean Alphabet,” Ph.D. diss.,
University of California, Berkely, 1966.
7 Michael Edson Robinson, Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920 1925
(Seatle: University of Washington Press, 1988), p.26, quotation on p.34

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(Hán văn) was used by Vietnamese Confucians for “serious literature” andnôm for “pleasure.”8
Like the conservative yangban who disliked use of han’gŭl. Emperor
Minhmang of the Nguyĕn tried to oust nôm from oﬃcial documents at court,
largely to bring order to the Vietnamese central government. Still, nômremained in use in elementary education (often to facilitate the teaching ofConfucianism to youngsters) and in literature, undoubtedly because it was theclosest thing to a written vernacular that the Vietnamese had. At the sametime, nôm had the capacity to undermine the state orthodox culture or at leastoﬀer alternative avenues for expression closer to native feelings.9
In the 17th century, the famous missionary Alexandre de Rhodes devised
a romanization for vernacular Vietnamese, later modiﬁed and dubbed quõcngũ’, a two-syllable expression that can be found in all four East Asian
countries, meaning “national language” and hence four diﬀerent things. As amedium of written discourse, however, only under the French colonial regime
in the latter half of the 19th century did quõć ngũ’ come into its own. The
French authorities saw it as a means of severing Vietnam culturally from therest of the Sinic sphere, because they wanted to draw the Vietnamese elite
into the French sphere. They hoped that with the continued use of quõć ngũ’the texts of the literary Chinese heritage would recede into the dusty past.
Logically precise, but wrong! In the hands of Vietnamese reformers,
nationalists, and revolutionaries, quõć ngũ’ —a complex alphabet in which
the tones are written as diacriticals but still far simpler to learn than an
ideographic language (be it Chinese or nôm)—though initially hated becauseof its origins, became the medium of vernacular access directly to theVietnamese people. Within a generation, by the early years of the 20th
century, quõć ngũ newspapers and journals began appearing in major cities,
and quõć ngũ’ was closely linked to rising nationalism and radicalism.10
8 Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of
Nguyen and Ch’ing Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), PP.51 53, 335; Wen You, “Lun
Zinan (Chũ’ Nôm) zhi Zuzhi jiqi yu Hanzi Zhi Guanshe” [On the organization ofChũ Nôm and its relationship to Chinese characters], Yanjing xuebao 14 (December
1933), pp.201 42; Nguyễn Đình Hòa, “Chũ Nôm: The Demotic System of Writingin Vietnam”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 79.4 (October-December1959), pp.270 74
9 Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, pp.54 58; David G. Marr,
Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920 1945 (Berkely: Univeristy of California Press,
1981), pp.141 44.
10 Alexander Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976), pp.78 79; Dvid G. Marr, Vietnamese
Anticolonialism, 1885 1925 (Berkely: Univeristy of California Press, 1971), pp.214
15; David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, pp.145 46; Hue-Tam Ho Tai,

Nationalism, the Vernacular, and Responses to Western Impact in East Asian Comparative Perspective

41

In addition to having two languages of their own (nôm and quõć ngũ’)and one on long-term loan from the north, the French conquest introduced yet
another language necessary for social advancement. Unlike colonial Korea,
where the Japanese banned the teaching of the native tongue, the French
encouraged both quõć ngũ’ and French. While French was the language of thehated conqueror, the Vietnamese had had a long experience in the use of alanguage borrowed from a hated conqueror. Furthermore, French was indeed
the language of an oppressive, unwelcome regime, but it also turned out—
upon further investigation—to be the language of Victor Hugo, Jean Jacques
Rousseau, and 1789. Major debates ensued in the 1910s and 1920s overwhich language—French or quõć ngũ’ —was appropriate for Vietnamese towrite in, while literary Chinese and nôm did in fact gradually decline inusage.11 All modern Vietnamese nationalists and radicals who came of age inthe ﬁrst half of the 20th century have been at least bilingual in French andVietnamese; many (including Hô Chí Minh) knew a fair amount of Chinese
as well.
Of the four East Asian countries, then, China was the last to adopt theuse of the vernacular as a means of reaching the masses in the modern
period. The extent to which May Fourth intellectuals may have been inﬂuenced by China’s neighbors, perhaps through contacts made in Japan, remains
an important scholarly desideratum. Many of the leaders of the New Culture
Movement had been students in Japan; and Liang Qichao, who lived in Japanfor fourteen years and whose writings were highly inﬂuential among Chinese
and Vietnamese there and later at home, was principally responsible forencouraging linguistic borrowing from the new, rich Meiji vocabulary. I thinka crucial link here is the rise of a modern, vernacular press in all the countries of East Asia.
Mixing East with West in Modernization Schemes
Another issue for comparative analysis is the manner in which the elites ineach of the four major East Asian countries envisioned the modernizing
process, the project of borrowing from the West while retaining the core of
their own native civilization. In China this attitude is usually summed up bya phrase attributed—I think incorrectly—to Zhang Zhidong: Zhongxue wei ti,
Xixue wei yong. In this late-19th-century conception, Western technology
Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992), pp.22 23, 49 50, 112
11 David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, pp.146 50, where these linguistic issues
are masterfully laid out. The best overall book on the complexity of linguistic
choices for Vietnamese is John Defrancis, Colonialism and Language Policy in Viet
Nam (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1977).

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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017

would be grafted onto or simply used to protect Chinese civilization. It wasan implicit statement of China’s weakness in science and technology, thoughturned around so that “science” appeared unessential to what was basic or ti.
Several decades later, Chinese students were still calling for science (Saixiansheng), though they were now linking it with a failing at the core ofChinese culture, the lack of democracy (De xiansheng).
In the generation before Zhang Zhidong and the self-strengthening movement, Japanese reformers were similarly looking for a way to open theircountry, save it from the fate visited upon China, and yet preserve their own
ethicomoral values. Sakuma Shōzan coined the term that typiﬁed thisapproach: Tōyō dōtoku Seiyō geijutsu (East Asian ethics and Western technology). Since the Chinese movement apparently failed to produce modernization, its bifurcated approach of mixing East and West in discrete spheres
has been seen as a failure by some, reactionary by others, while the perceived“success” of the Meiji Restoration has aﬀorded the Japanese approach a more
hospitable reception. However, Professor Min Tu-gi of Seoul National
University has demonstrated the remarkable similarity in the intellectual
frameworks of the two.12 If something went wrong with the yangwu movement in China, in other words, it must lay elsewhere.
Another slogan coined in the Meiji period, though less widely used, was
Wakon Yōsai (Japanese soul, Western talent). This phrase derives interestingly
in a much older one, allegedly dating to the Heian period, Wakon Kansai(Japanese soul, Chinese talent). In the earlier era, when Japan had been forborrowing heavily from China, the slogan was meant to remind Japanese of
the need to retain their inner core. Adapted to the later 19th century, Yōreplaced kan, though the force of the slogan in the respective ages of“modernization” remained remarkably similar.
We ﬁnd a similar development in Korea. In the aftermath of several
decades of anti-foreign calls by the yangban elite to ‘reject heterodoxy’(ch’oksa), inspired by Western and later Japanese aggression, Koreans of aself-styled ‘enlightenment’ (kaehwa) mind began in the 1880s to see the needfor some accomodation with things Western while retaining a basic
Confucian core. This new idea materialized in the phrase Tongdo Sogi
12 Min Tu-ki (Min Tu-gi), “Chinese ‘Principle’ and Western ‘Utility’, a Reassessment,”
in his National Polity and Local Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1989), pp.51 62, 85 88. The salient diﬀerence between the Chinese and Japaneseslogans for self-strengthening should be noted; namely, the moral values for bepreserved in the Japanese case were identiﬁed with East Asia and this assumed a
Sinic core, while in the Chinese case the fundament was identiﬁed with Chinaalone. Both cases bespeak the ongoing acceptance of a common Sinic basis to theentire East Asian ethic realm.

Nationalism, the Vernacular, and Responses to Western Impact in East Asian Comparative Perspective

43(Eastern ways, Western instruments).13 Again, the identiﬁcation of this dual
approach to modernization with enlightenment thought and a rejection of
xenophobia bears a strong resemblance to the Chinese and Japanese cases.
Korea, though, bore the added brunt of being the victim not only of Western
expansionism but Japanese as well.
In 19th-century Vietnam, a permutation of this slogan was not bandied
about by the elite, but debate over this tiyong (or thếkụng) style of thinking
was possibly more trenchant than elsewhere throughout East Asia. Being a
French colony from the 1860s, the issue of whether to resist the Frenchwholeheartedly or adopt their technology so as to be able to expel them at alater date was of much greater immediacy. The Chinese, Japanese, andKoreans were facing a threat of future humiliation; the Vietnamese alreadyhad to deal with a conqueror. As Ralph Smith summed it up some years ago:
“What attitude ought the Vietnamese to take toward their conquerors? Could
anything be gained by cooperation with the West, by seeking to learn fromthe West? And if so, what was the proper relationship between the culture andinstitutions of the past, and the ideas and institutions to be borrowed from theWest?”14
Conclusions
More generally, I think our understanding of many other themes in the evolution of modern China can be enriched through this sort of comparative
perspective. Being on China’s cultural periphery has allowed the othernations of East Asia a range of options not always available in China,
although it has often come at considerable psychological, even physical cost.
Using Chinese characters as opposed to a native written language or speaking
a language of foreign origin as opposed one’s native tongue were rarely
choices that Chinese intellectuals were compelled to make, even during
periods of foreign conquest, with the possible exception of the early decadesof the Qing. As a result, the issues such concerns forced to the surface―issues of national and cultural identity, issues of determining where one’s own
culture ended and Chinese culture began, major issues of self-deﬁnition―
13 Ki-baik Lee, A New History of Korea, pp.299, 302; Korea, Old and New: A History(Seoul: Ilchokak, 1990), pp.208 209.
14 Ralph Smith, Viet-Nam and the West (London: Heinemann, 1968), pp.25, 30, quotation on p.29; Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, pp.200, 261. In
discussing the Vietnamese students sent to study in China and Japan in the movement pioneered by reformer Phan Bôi Cháu from 1905, Professor Tai notes that “thestudents brought by Phan to China or Japan had conceived of Western learningessentially as a technique to ﬁght colonialism; they sought to contain ideas in astrictly functionalist framework, leaving intact their fundamental values and sense of
self.” Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, p.170.

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had, I would argue, less of an impact on the Chinese until perhaps theconfrontation with the West in the 19th century. By the time, Japan, Korea,
and Vietnam had been working through these kinds of self-deﬁnitional problems for centuries, even millennia (the Japanese still are). China simply had
no “other” against which to see itself.
The overwhelming inﬂuence of high Sini culture in the other countries
of East Asia was not only incredibly beneﬁcial to their individual maturations
as societies and cultures, but it also provided a natural straw-person against
which a nativist movement more directly concerned with issues of self-deﬁnition could react. As Maruyama Masao and many others since have shownfor Japan, the kokugaku (nativist) movement also shared much with the Sinic
tradition at which it took aim in Japan; that it perceived its lack of a written
textual traditions as a lacuna was due to the fact that both the major continental imports, Confucianism and Buddhism, had readily accessible and very
thick canons. Without China as “other”, nativism had no meaning in Japan.
No comparable movements developed in Korea or Vietnam, though theabsence of a native response to Chinese culture of this sizable sort means
neither that such movements were snuﬀed out in their infancy nor that
Chinese culture simply overwhelmed the Vietnamese and the Koreans. Bothare logical possibilities, but much more likely are two other scenarios. First,
as the case of Korea seems to make clearer, Confucian culture on Korean soil
was never seen as an unwelcome or alien intruder. It was not perceived in thesame manner as Japanese eﬀorts in the ﬁrst half of the 20th century to replace
Korean culture with Japan’s own. Confucianism was “international.” Second,as the case of Vietnam seems to make clearer, Confucian culture barely
reached below the level of the elite, having little to do with everyday lives of
the agricultural populace for a variety of complex reasons. The Vietnamese
elite did indeed engage in the discourse of Neo-Confucian commentaries andcriticism across what we would now call national boundaries, but not (apparently) as proliﬁcally as their East Asian neighbors.15
Students of Chinese history need not all become comparativists to realizethat fresh light is cast on China’s historical evolution through comparisons
15 On Vietnamese Confucianism, see Tsuboi Yoshiharu, “Vetonaumu ni okeru Jukyō”[Neo-Confucianism in Vietnam], Shisō, 792 (June 1990), pp.163 78; R. B. Smith,“The Cycle of Confucianization in Vietnam,” in Aspects of Vietnam History, ed.
Walter F. Vella (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973), pp.1 29; John K.
Whitmore, “Social Organization and Confucian Thought in Vietnam,”Journal ofSoutheast Asian Studies 15.2 (September 1984), pp.296 306. On Korean
Neo-Confucianism, see Ki-baik Lee, A New History of Korea, passim; and especially
The Rise of Neo-Confucianism in Korea, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and JaHyun
Kim Haboush (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

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45

with her cultural neighbors. I would like to go one step further and to argue,
though, that little light is shed on our understanding of China’s historicaldevelopment by comparing this or that element or institution with somesuperﬁcially similar element or institution outside the Sinic cultural sphere. If
one is looking for reasons to explain why China failed to develop along
Western lines, then comparisons with the West would certainly be in order;
however, such questions are fundamentally self-serving and at best turn up
conclusions of a highly dubious quality.

AppendixContents and Introduction of Between China and Japan: The Writing of
Joshua Fogel, by Joshua Fogel. Brill Academic Pub., 2015

Contents
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Introduction: My Route into Asian Studies
Art History and Sino-Japanese Relations
Miyazaki Tōten and the 1911 Revolution
New Thoughts on an Old Controversy: Shina as a Toponym for China
The Gold Seal of 57 CE and the Afterlife of an Inanimate Object
Japanese Views of China in Historical Perspective
Translator’s Preface to Books and Boats (Ōba Osamu)
The Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies
Chinggis on the Japanese Mind
A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations:
The Senzaimaru Voyage to Shanghai of 1862
Lust for Still Life: Chinese Painters in Japan and Japanese Painters in China
in the 1860s and 1870s
The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory
Prostitutes and Painters
Early Japanese Migrants to Shanghai
On Translating Shiba Ryōtarō into English
Tackling the Translation of an Invaluable Primary Source that No One
Person Would Dare Face Alone
Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan
Response to Herbert P. Bix, “Remembering the Nanking Massacre”
Naitō Konan and Naitō’s Historiography:
A Reconsideration in the Early Twenty-First Century

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4
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24
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65
77
81
101
111
133
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179
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225
242
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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017
Japanese Travelers to Shanghai in the 1860s
An Important Japanese Source for Chinese Business History
Chinese Understanding of the Japanese Language from Ming to Qing
“Shanghai-Japan”: The Japanese Residents’ Association of Shanghai
Introduction: Masuda Wataru and the Study of Modern China
The Japanese and the Jews: A Comparative Analysis of Their Communities
in Harbin, 1898 1930
The Controversy over Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking
The Nanjing Massacre in History
Integrating into Chinese Society:
A Comparison of the Japanese Communities of Shanghai and Harbin
The Other Japanese Community: Leftwing Japanese Activities in Wartime
ShanghaiAkutagawa Ryūnosuke and China
Confucian Pilgrim: Uno Tetsuto’s Travels in China
Japanese Travelers in Wartime China
Nationalism, the Rise of the Vernacular, and the Conceptualization ofModernization in East Asian Comparative Perspective
Recent Translation Theory and Linguistic Borrowing in the Modern
Sino-Japanese Cultural Context
Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China
Japanese Approaches to the Cultural Revolution:
A Review of Kokubun Ryōsei’s Survey of the Literature
The Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production in Soviet Russia, China,
and Japan
Introduction: Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the South Manchurian
Railway Company
A New Direction in Japanese Sinology
On the “Rediscovery” of the Chinese Past: Cui Shu and Related Cases
Index

276
297
299
337
369
373
394
399
406
431
455
459
488
496
507
518
543
548
577
597
617
641

Introduction: My Route into Asian Studies
My route into Asian studies is about as normal as it would have been unpredictable beforehand. As a third-generation American—all of my grandparents
were immigrants from Eastern Europe in the second decade of the twentiethcentury—I was neither the ﬁrst person in my family to get a B.A. nor even a
Ph.D. I was, however, the ﬁrst person to become interested in the history andculture of East Asia. Because there was such a bookish culture in my family,
though, it was never seen as an unusual pursuit; in fact, I’m certain that mylefty parents were thrilled that one of theirs was studying China, given what
was for them the exciting events in the years immediately preceding my birthin 1950. In fact, many people have commented (and occasionally reachedNationalism, the Vernacular, and Responses to Western Impact in East Asian Comparative Perspective

47

some far-fetched conclusions) about the natural ties between Chinese andJews. I personally don’t buy any of it, though of course I respect their rightto have silly views.
Although born in Brooklyn, New York, I grew up from age seven in
Berkeley, California precisely in those now famous years of political turmoil
and excitement. Mine was a politically active, left-of-center family, and thatmeant countless marches and rallies for the important causes of the day: thecivil rights movement, the movement in opposition to the American war inViet Nam War, and many spin-oﬀs of both. I spent my college years at the
University of Chicago (1968 1972), continuing in those same activities andthere developing a keen interest in modern China.
At the University of Chicago, I studied ﬁrst with the late Professor Tang
Tsou in the political science department and later with Philip Kuhn and Akira
Iriye in history. In 1972 I entered graduate school at Columbia University
where I initially studied with C. Martin Wilbur and, upon his retirement, with
Wm. Theodore de Bary. During those years, I studied Chinese (from 1970)
and then Japanese (from 1973) relentlessly, day and night. Americans wereunable to study in China throughout most of the 1970s, so that was still aromantic, though never actually a practical, desideratum. Columbia had arather draconian language requirement (long since watered down), and thus I
had taken the equivalent of a fair number of years of both Chinese andJapanese language (including summers) by the time I was searching for athesis topic.
I forget who ﬁrst suggested the topic of Naitō Konan (1866 1934), thegreat Japanese Sinologist, but I jumped at the suggestion. The next thing I
knew I was reading my ﬁrst book in Japanese, cover to cover, a biography ofNaitō by one of his last students, Mitamura Taisuke of Ritsumeikan
University. And, in late 1976 I was oﬀ on my ﬁrst trip to Asia with support
from the Fulbright Foundation and later from the Japanese Ministry of
Education. I spent roughly eighteen months at Kyoto University, where Naitō
had pioneered Chinese studies at the beginning of the twentieth century,
reading through his works, soaking up as much of the Sinological world of
Kyoto University as possible, and interviewing Naitō’s last students. I also
made some of my best friends among the students of that generation in
Kyoto at the time.
Historical studies were in those days largely compartmentalized bynations. The idea of crossing borders and working on more than one national
entity at the same time was not frowned upon, but it was not exactly encouraged either—anywhere in the world. Diplomatic historians at least paid lip
service to working in multiple archives and multiple languages, but in reality
few historians, diplomatic or otherwise, working in the West were actually

48

Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017

doing that. Professor Iriye was one of those few and a great inspiration tome.
Many times over the years I have been asked, in East Asia as well as theWest, if I am ﬁrst and foremost a historian of China or Japan. The answer I
like to give—and usually do—is that I don’t make that distinction. I explainthat I pick topics that cross the Sino-Japanese border and go where theresearch necessitates I go. We now have the language of “border-crossing”
and “global studies” and even “globalization,” but that is a relative recent
addition to the historian’s lexicon.
But, once I sensed the wealth of fascinating but still unstudied topics in
Sino-Japanese interactions, I was an immediate convert. Subsequent research
topics and books included: the life and work of a Japanese expatriate in
China (Nakae Ushikichi, 1889 1942); Japanese travel writings about China(1862 1945); the Japanese community of Shanghai; Japanese historiography(1784–present) concerning the gold seal presented by the founding emperorof the Later Han dynasty in 57 CE to an emissary from somewhere in thatspace we now call Japan and soon lost before being found in the late eighteenth century; and most recently, the voyage of the Senzaimaru in 1862 andthe restarting of Sino-Japanese diplomatic and commercial relations in themodern era. Many run-ups to and spin-oﬀs from these (and other) projects are
represented in the essays that follow in this collection.
In 1988 I called together a small group which met in my hotel room at
the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, and we formed the
Sino-Japanese Studies Group. There were only about ﬁfteen of us at thetime—Sherman Cochran reassured me that there were fewer participants at
the ﬁrst national congress of the Chinese Communist Party—and we weren’t
exactly sure what we wanted to do, but we agreed that we would try to meeteach year in conjunction with the AAS meetings and that I would launch the
Sino-Japanese Studies Newsletter. It was to come out twice annually. I thensent out hundreds of announcements for subscriptions to this new periodical,
and we were oﬀ. After two issues, we dropped “Newsletter” from the title.
Aside from a short hiatus, we have been bringing SJS out ever since. It is now
free and online (www.chinajapan.org), and articles are posted as they are run
through the reviewing mill and accepted.
I began my teaching career at Harvard University (1981 1988) at a time
when there was no normal route to tenure candidacy there. I then moved to
the University of California at Santa Barbara (1989 2005). My position in the
History Department there was deﬁned as “comparative East Asianist,” adesignation I was extremely proud to ﬂaunt. During that time I was blessedwith a one-year visiting professorship at Kyoto University’s prestigious
Institute for Research in the Humanities (Jinbun kagaku kenkyūjo) andNationalism, the Vernacular, and Responses to Western Impact in East Asian Comparative Perspective

49

blessed again with a two-year visiting professorship (2001 2003) at the
School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New
Jersey. In 2005 I took up my present Canada Research Chair at York
University in Toronto.
I had hoped that the kind of “border-crossing” that my research entails
would become a broader trend than it has in the larger world of East Asianstudies. The systemic problems remain: diﬃcult languages, institutional pressures to work on one country at a time, latent anti-Japanese feelings in the
China ﬁeld, and the like. In fact, many people have overcome these disabilities, though not all of them have come rushing to do inter-East Asian studies.
I personally remained convinced that the modern histories of the two entities
we now called “China” and “Japan” (to say nothing of “Taiwan” and “HongKong”) are so inextricably intertwined that one has to take the other into
account when studying virtually any topic. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, this statement is more diﬃcult to sustain, but there are those
who are so convinced.
The essays in this collection represent work I have done over the past
thirty-plus years, from my last days as a graduate student in the late 1970s
through more recent times. The ﬁeld of Sino-Japanese studies as I understandit can be roughly divided into comparative history and the history of interactions. Most of these essays take up the latter theme, though some address theformer or employ both approaches.