The Cultural Evolution of Postwar Japan pp 65-86 | Cite as
Shouldering Giants: The Presentation of Western Intellectual and Cultural Elite to Interwar Japan
Chapter
Abstract
Among the contributions made by Yamamoto Sanehiko to interwar Japan, one of the least known and inadequately documented was his role in bringing to Japan for lecture tours some of the West’s most notable figures. 1 In an age before the easy exchange of information via a dizzying array of electronic media, the impact of such visits on the intellectual, social, and cultural life of Japan by these Western luminaries, whose accomplishments and whose very names were in some cases not widely known in Japan prior to these visits, was nothing less than profound.
Keywords
Cultural Evolution Interwar Period Notable Figure Meiji Period Yasukuni Shrine
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Notes
- 1.In her biography of Yamamoto Sanehiko, Matsubara Kazue provides an overview of each of these visits by Western intellectuals but fails to address fully either Yamamoto’s motivations for bringing these figures to Japan or the legacies of those visits. See Matsubara Kazue, Kaizōsha to Yamamoto Sanehiko (Kaizōsha and Yamamoto Sanehiko) (Kagoshima: Nanpō shinsha, 2000).Google Scholar
- 2.In contemporary parlance, these foreign “helpers,” active in Japan in fields as diverse as professional sports and English language education, are referred to as suketto (hired hands). See Paul Scott, “Uchiyama Kanzō : A Case Study in Sino-Japanese Interaction,” Sino-Japanese Studies 2: 2 (May 1990): 48.Google Scholar
- 3.Hazel J. Jones, Live Machines: Hired Foreigners and Meiji Japan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1980), xiv.Google Scholar
- 8.Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 137. Another quote from this book seems to reflect one dimension of Yamamoto’s motivation to bring Western intellectual elite to Japan. In speaking of the rationale for utilizing foreign experts in the Meiji period, Gluck contends that foreigners “were the ideological means to the patriotic end,” 137.Google Scholar
- 9.Miura Toshihiko, “Rasseru to Chūgoku, Nihon” (Russell and China, Japan), Hikaku bungaku 29 (1986), 10.Google Scholar
- 13.Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude: 1872–1921 (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 603.Google Scholar
- 15.Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914–1944 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), 191.Google Scholar
- 34.Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 245.Google Scholar
- 36.Lawrence Lader, The Margaret Sanger Story and the Fight for Birth Control (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1955), 188.Google Scholar
- 77.Zhou Guowei, Lu Xun yu riben youren (Lu Xun and Japanese Friends) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2006), 217.Google Scholar
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© Christopher T. Keaveney 2013