1) Ross Bender:
I just finished reading Orienting Arthur Waley: Japonism, Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English by John Walter de Gruchy (Hawaii, 2003) which is chock full of fascinating insights about the origin of premodern Japanese studies.
One of my favorite factoids is that when the SOAS was founded in 1917 in London, there were seven students in the Japanese program in the first year, "rising to an average of twenty-seven a year over the next five years." After the termination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1921, the average number dropped to a mere eleven students between 1923 and 1941, and only two students actually took degrees in the period between the wars. According to de Gruchy, quoting Earl Miner, it was not until Donald Keene that the academic field of Japanese literature was actually created as an academic discipline.
2) Matthew Stavros:
Yes, thanks to all those Americans trained in the war. Without them, were
would my own program, which was established in 1917 be? Then of course,
there was the work of WG Aston, Earnest Satow, Basil Hall Chamberlain,
James Murdoch, and of course Arthur Waley, but perhaps they don't count.
3. Ross Bender:
"Of course Waley had his own bones to pick with the English Victorians, and
his terse appraisal of Chamberlain is classic Waley: 'Very free verse translations from the Manyo and Kokin, in this style:
'I muse on the old-world story,
As the boats glide to and fro,
Of the fisher-boy Urashima,
Who a-fishing lov'd to go.' "" (quoted in deGruchy, p. 73)
If I have it right, deGruchy is counting Aston, Satow, and Chamberlain as "Victorian orientalists", while Waley is the first "modernist orientalist." I'm not sure that any of the above were full-time academics associated with a university. At any rate, if I understand him, deGruchy's point is that there was no institutional continuity between these pioneers and the academic fields or disciplines of Japanese studies of today. For some reason, he doesn't seem to comment on Australia.
My professor of early Chinese history, Hans Bielenstein, used to tell stories about how he met his (American) wife in Australia. But according to his Wikipedia entry:
"In 1952, Bielenstein was appointed head of the School of Oriental Languages in Canberra University College in Canberra, Australia (since 1960 part of A <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_National_University>ustralian National University). Bielenstein was the first professor of modern or classical Chinese language anywhere in Australia."
3. Michael Wachutka
It all goes to show how comparatively recent "Premodern Japanese Studies" is as a discipline, if it can be said to constitute a "discipline", and how extremely dependent on world politics it is. If not for WWII and the crop of Americans trained as Japanese language students, then what?
Yes, thanks to all those Americans trained in the war. Without them, were would my own program, which was established in 1917 be? Then of course, there was the work of WG Aston, Earnest Satow, Basil Hall Chamberlain, James Murdoch, and of course Arthur Waley, but perhaps they don't count.
... and not to forget other paragons as Karl Florenz (1865-1937), the German scholar who besides his many works on Japanese literature and religion for instance translated the Kojiki, the Nihon shoki, and the Kogo shûi. (He also produced the first complete translation and commentary of the Man'yôshû, but unfortunately his manuscript was burned in the air raids of Hamburg - so much for the 'positive' influence of WWII).
Florenz in my opinion best represents the transformation of the study of (premodern) 'Things Japanese' into an institutionalized discipline: Japanology as an independent field at the university level. After teaching at the Imperial University in Tôkyô for about 25 years, in 1914 he returned to Germany where he had accepted the newly inaugurated professorship of Japanese Studies at Hamburg University and taught for about another 20 years.
By the way, Karl Florenz also was the first foreigner who (on 10 June 1899) was awarded the academic grade of 'bungaku hakushi' by the Imperial University for his "Thesis" on the kami-yo no maki in Nihon shoki, which in 1901 was published as Japanische Mythologie.
4. Kuniko McVey
And further going off, here is an essay on "Terakoya" (L'ecole de village) that was translated by Karl Frorenz in chirimen-bon (crape-paper book) edition in 1900 and other chirimen-bon that became popular in turn of the century. The series, in several European languages with many color illustrations, was a publisher Hasegawa
Takejiro's creation and Karl Florenz was instrumental for this project. (page 4-17)
http://www.ndl.go.jp/jp/publication/geppo/pdf/geppo1108.pdf
Nichibunken (International research center for Japanese studies) offers 21chirimen-bon in full-color here.
http://shinku.nichibun.ac.jp/chirimen/index.php?disp=EN
5. K.N. Paramore
The beginnings of Japanology/Japanese Studies as a discipline is I guess an issue many of us are interested in.
I am very grateful to the references to de Gruchy and a couple of other titles in the posts thus far, but might I ask if anyone knows of any studies specifically dealing with the institutionalization of the study of Japan in the Western academy?
[Japanology in Foreign Countries: History and Trends] Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2007, contains some useful snippets here and there, but it is more a collection of short jottings than any kind of study. So far the most useful thing I have found in the libraries here at Academia Sinica is Herbert Franke [Sinology at German Universities] Steiner Wiesbaden, 1968. But I wonder if there is something like this for Japanese studies? I am especially interested in anything in either German or French about those countries, as they, together with Holland, seem to be key for the all-important nineteenth century end of the history.
A major point Franke makes (for the Sinology case at least) is how dominant the forerunner of INALCO was through the entire nineteenth century, especially in terms of impact on Germany. So anything on the history of Japanology (or Sinology) in France would be of great use.
There are three particular issues that interest me in this history:
1. The relationship between non-area specialist new disciplines (particularly science of religions) and the study of Asian texts.
Was Florenz’s Japanologie at Hamburg really the first institutionalized study of Japanese language texts in Germany? Were Japanese and Chinese texts not read at all in the emerging religious studies centres, or in other places in Europe with an interest in Buddhism? What was the relationship between Japanese coming to study Buddhology in Germany and the development of Japanologie or other disciplinary settings for the reading of Japanese and Chinese (if any)?
2. The relationship between the development of Sinology and Japanology in different European countries.
Leiden is an interesting case in this respect. The first Professor of Japanology in Europe, J. Hoffmann (1805-1878), apparently had better Chinese than Japanese on appointment. More importantly, it seems that under primarily Japanese influence he perceived of Japan itself as an element of Sinitic civilization. This positioning of Japan vis a vis China is even more confrontingly presented in the forwards that Nishi Amane and Tsuda Mamichi wrote in Japanese and Dutch for Hoffmann’s publication of the Daxue in Chinese, Kundoku and Dutch translation (as a teaching primer) in the 1860s. There Nishi and Tsuda both claimed to authenticate Hoffmann’s work because, as Japanese, they represented authentic East Asian civilization – I don’t have the text to hand here in Taiwan unfortunately, but I think the words they used were Toyo bunmei. So Chinese language and classical texts were not only taught as a core part of the Japanology program, Japanology itself was seen to some extent as one wing of East Asian studies ineluctably intertwined with the study of Chinese culture. At this time there was still no chair of Chinese at Leiden. I can imagine in some other places, a bit later, this process may have worked in reverse – Japanese may have been taught in Sinology programs, etc. Surely it is also significant that only 10 years after Hoffmann was preparing this primer with Nishi and Tsuda, Satow and Florenz both gave many of their major papers on Japanese culture at the Asiatic Society of Japan.
3. The relationship between state sponsorship and religious (Christian missionary) sponsorship of study.
Surely one reason the chair at Leiden was in Japanese and not Chinese was related to state trade, and surely the reason why chairs sponsored, supported or influenced in some way by missionary groups in other countries were in Chinese and not Japanese was that the China mission was perceived as more active/promising?
As a “new European” I am rather ignorant of this history and therefore throw myself upon the mercy of my more cultured autochtoon colleagues to enlighten me such as that may be possible. I would be very keen to learn about any previous discussions of these issues.
6. Michael Wachutka
At least in German there are several works (articles as well as some monographs) dealing in some way or another with the history of Japanology or Japanese Studies.Your detailed questions however deserve and require a detailed and long reply, which unfortunately at the moment I lack the time but hope to get around to in a few days.
For the moment, just a very short reply to one thing you mention:> Was Florenz’s Japanologie at Hamburg really the first institutionalized study of Japanese language texts in Germany?
I did not mean to say that this was the first "institutionalized study of Japanese language texts" in Germany. But Florenz since 1914 was the first chair of Japanology as an independent subject/discipline at a University, i.e. not as part of a broader area of study such as "Oriental Philology".
For instance, there also was the Seminar of Oriental Languages (Seminar fuer Orientalische Sprachen, SOS) at the University of Berlin, inaugurated in 1887, where one of the languages taught was Japanese. Incidentally, Karl Florenz was among the first batch of students there before going to Japan in 1889 -- and his Japanese language teacher at the SOS was Inoue Tetsujiro.
7. Peter Kornicki
I have compiled a preliminary bibliography of the history of japanology which can be consulted here:
http://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/jbib/For2-12.html
If anybody has any additions, please let me know.
There are many other figures worth mentioning, such as August Pfizmaier in Vienna who taught Japanese and published a translation of a novel by Ryûtei Tanehiko, Léon de Rosny in Paris, who published a journal in romanised Japanese called Yo no ouwasa, Julius Klaproth whose collection of Japanese books is listed in an auction catalogue and who used Japanese sources in his writings, Isaac Titsingh, who translated extensively from Japanese, Engelbert Kaempfer of course, and Herbert de Jager (or whoever it was), who drew up a scheme for the study of Japan and the kinds of Japanese sources he wanted. The first courses in Japanese conducted in a European language were run at the Russian Naval School in the late 18th century: it was based in St Petersburg and then moved to Irkutsk: the teachers were Japanese castaways but at least some of them possessed books which shows that they were at least literate, if not qualified teachers!
