Abstract
To establish the process by which the literary world of early Meiji Japan,1 inherited from the Tokugawa period (1615–1868), was transformed into one which may be called ‘modern’, it is useful to accept the organising concept of Japan as a country undergoing the process of modernisation. Modernisation, according to J. Hall, ‘involves the systematic, sustained and purposeful application of human energies to the rational [author’s italics] control of man’s physical and social environment for various human purposes’.2 It is within the context of the battle between the irrational and rational elements in the patterns of thought and behaviour of Japanese writers that the modernisation of Japanese literature took place. In its background lies the gradual process of transformation of the whole country from a pre-modern type of society into a modern state.
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Notes
M. Bradbury, The Social Context of Modern English Literature ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971 ) pp. 9–11.
For a detailed description of the various types of popular literature in the Tokugawa period, see D. Keene, World within Walls (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976 ).
Itō Sei, Bungei tokuhon in Itō Sei zenshū (Collected Works of Itō Sei), vol. 17 (Shinchosha, 1973) pp. 145–50. As most quotations used here are taken from this edition of his collected works, the latter will be referred to hereafter simply as Zenshū.
Kosaka Masaaki, Japanese Thought in the Meiji Era (Pan-Pacific Press, 1958) p. 54.
M. Ryan, Japan’s First Modern Novel ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1967 ) p. 64.
The novel has recently been translated into English by K. Strong under the title Footprints in the Snow (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971).
K. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity 1885–1895 ( Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1969 ) p. 78.
Itō Sei, ‘Rise of Naturalism’, Japan Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 4 (1955) p. 510.
Itō Sei, Kyūdōsha to ninshikisha (Shinchosha, 1962) p. 159.
Maruyama Masao, Nihon no shisō (Iwanami Shinsho, 1961) p. 129.
Itō Sei, Shōsetsu no hōhō (Kawade Shobo, 1956) p. 81.
Nakamura Mitsuo, Modern Japanese Fiction vol. i (Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai, 1968) p. 42.
Quoted by Odagiri Hideo, Bungakushi (Tokyo Keizai Shinposha, 1969) p. 150.
Uchida Roan, Bungakusha to naru hō in Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū vol. 41 (Kaizōsha, 1930) pp. 376–436.
One of the famous maxims enunciated by General Araki Sadao, quoted by Maruyama Masao in Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics ( London: Oxford University Press, 1963 ) p. 8.
Fukutake Tadashi, Man and Society in Japan (The University of Tokyo Press, 1962) chapter I, passim.
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© 1983 Irena Powell
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Powell, I. (1983). The Meiji Literary World: the Struggle for Modernisation. In: Writers and Society in Modern Japan. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05028-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05028-4_1
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