Canon and Identity
By I. Hijiya-Kirschnereit
It is in the light of these new research agendas in the Humanities and Social Sciences that a
reconsideration of the Japanese case promises new insights. Special attention was paid to the
foreign or the Other in this process. Whereas Europe (as occident) appeared to be offering
the framework for new models of Japanese cultural identify, China, the perennial Other,
attained a new role as well.
In the process of creating a nation-state and constructing a national identity, language and
literature played an important part. In the same way that the idea of a nation-state produced
the concept of a national language, involving a policy of homogenization and the 'unification
of the written and the spoken language' (genbun itchi), literature, above all, was
redefined and institutionalized in new ways. At the same time -- and at a different level --
literary theory and literary history were set up within the newly founded framework of
academic institutions and served to formulate notions of a national cultural tradition. It was
these areas of intellectual life -- interconnected but readily identifiable on their own -- which
formed the focus of attention.
The symposium, sponsored by the European Science Foundation, took place at the Japanese
German Centre Berlin from 11 - 13 October 1995. It was organized in conjunction with the
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and its project group 'Challenges of the Other'.
The symposium, devised to focus on issues of identity and canon formation in the context
of the challenges of the Western Other which Japan had to meet in the late 19th century,
brought together specialists on early modern Japanese history, culture, language, literature,
and the history of sciences as well as comparativists. Commentators from neighbouring
disciplines such as European philologies, science historians, ethnologists etc. played a part
by pointing out parallels, analogies, or deviations in the development of other cultures and
focused on systematic aspects in the processes of incorporation and exclusion.
Each of the four panels, dedicated to 'Contexts'; 'Japanese Authenticity: native knowledge and national language'; 'Literature'; and 'Literary Historiography', were rounded off by comments from two colleagues, which opened the perspective to include not only the different views on the Japanese topic, but also introduced, as contrasting reference, the case of other cultures where analogous processes can be studied. More than 30 minutes were reserved for discussion after each presentation, and it was at this point that, after additional stimulation by the commentators, the participants as well as the audience of some 50 invited guests entered into a lively exchange of opinions and information.
Canonical moment
The conference succeeded in bringing together not only Japan specialists of different
disciplines from three continents, representing different 'schools' and approaches, thereby
stimulating communication across more recent boundaries in research on Japan. Summing
up the results, we may state that the conference highlighted the complexities, from a
historical as well as a systematic perspective, of Japanese modernization in some central
areas of intellectual life. Thus, the function of Western theories of nation, race, national
language and literature as paradigms in the process of identity formation, as well as the
complex forms of 're-inventing tradition' were studied in detail. An interesting observation
arising from this context is the fact that in the course of dealing with the Western challenge,
the temporal Other tends to be re-interpreted as precursor of the present Self, while the
spatial Other, i.a. the West is focused as the Alien. Likewise, in this dichotomic model,
China, the perennial Other, attains relative closeness to Japan in relation to the West. Canon
and identity formation can, above all, be studied and analysed by drawing boundaries anew
between 'us' and 'them', be it within Japanese society or between other political and
historical units. The mid-Meiji Period, on which most of the papers focused, therefore
emerged as 'canonical moment', in which many of those 'essences' which have characterized
the Japanese self-image down to the present day, were construed.
The papers given at this conference will be published in the publication series of the project
group 'Challenges of the Other' of the Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences at Akademie
Verlag Berlin.
This workshop was selected for support in 1994 and held in December 1995. reports from other ESF Asia Committee workshops held in 1995 are to be found in IIAS Newsletters 6 and 7.