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Welcome to the new books network. Hello and welcome back to another episode of New Books on Japanese Studies, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I am Jean-Elie from the University of Arizona. Today we have Dr.
William Bretcher with us to talk about his new book, Japan's Private Saphiers, Autonomy in Japanese History, published by Brill recently. This book looks into the social cultural preconditions or predispositions of individuality through an array of case studies. Dr. Bretcher is currently teaching and researching about East Asian history at Washington State University.
So welcome, Puck. Thank you so much for joining us today on the new books on Japanese Studies. Thanks, Jean-Elie. It's nice to be here.
Thank you. So this is such an interesting topic. We hear a lot in Japanese classes when we first started learning about Japanese language and culture. The teachers will always tell us about the Japanese collectivism and Western individualism story.
And we are many Japanese learners that told about the Lao-Motte disparity, the public, private disparity. So how did you become interested in historicizing this issue? How did it all begin? Yes, so it all began with my classes.
I noticed that my students often referred to this Japanese collectivism, Western individualism, pairing. And I felt that as a teacher I should warn them against these types of stereotypes and essentialisms. But on the other hand, we all tend to do it, right? The sorts of tropes or expedience we use them for convenience, even while knowing that they're not academically viable.
And in fact, you know, as academics, so much of our work is focused on rejecting these stereotypes. So I've always felt that we cannot uncritically accept these dichotomies nor can we uncritically reject them. So where's the middle ground? Can we historicize Japanese collectivism, Japanese individualism, Japanese privacy, et cetera.
And in the process, learn what's true, what's accurate, what's not accurate. And also learn how those ideas evolved over time. And clearly they do evolve over time. We can look back and see that individuality and autonomy are more pervasive, more tolerated in some historical times than they are in others.
The tysho period, for example, we've all studied about tysho democracy and the existential boom that occurred during that time with so many people turning inward and exploring their interiority and so forth. And, you know, another time that jumps out, obviously, is the post-bubble economy, the lost decades, right? This was another time that was described as a new era, a moral crisis when people were thinking only about themselves, people were turning inward. So if we can see fluctuations in the prevalence of private spheres and the prevalence of autonomy, then we should be able to historicize that.
That's really impressive. It's such a high level of professionalism that in order to explain to your language, class students, you're writing a book about this whole issue. But I'm actually a big fan of your first book, The Athletics of Strangeness, which deals with the history of eccentricity in early modern Japan. Then your second book was on wartime Japan, and now we have a book on the individuality that covers from pre-modern to modern Japan, how did your research subject transform?
Yes, my research subjects jumped around quite a bit throughout my career, jumped around both in terms of the topics I've studied and also the time periods that I've studied. I choose a research topic because it interests me, and I want to know more about it. And when you approach research that way, you become attracted to what you don't know. This means that I'm constantly doomed to start from scratch whenever I begin a new project, rather than building off of my old projects.
And although this is a lot more work, in the end it's more fun for me personally, more rewarding because I'm broadening my knowledge of the field. And that goes particularly for this book, which covers over three centuries of Japanese history. So, yeah, I guess I just go ahead myself as a generalist. And being a generalist pays dividends in the classroom, certainly, allows me to teach more broadly, mentor more students with broader interests.
Of course, there are downsides to it also. As many of my colleagues, my fellow Japanese historians will point out, a Jack of all trades is a master of none. But I feel that there is a deficiency of generalists in Japanese studies, and I think the field could use more of it. I certainly agree.
So for your next book, can we expect something completely different? Yes, in fact. Nice, I look forward to it. So, for this book, I understand that it covers a lot of materials.
It's an array of case studies. Could you briefly talk about the structure of the book and how it serves the agenda of this book? Okay. So the book traces the relationship between the public and the private in Japan from about 1600 up to the pre-war era of the 1930s.
Obviously, this is a massive topic. It's so broad that it's not really researchable by standard methods. You can't go to a database and do a search for Japan's privacy years. You can't do a search for Japanese privacy or individuality, autonomy, and so forth.
You won't get anything. You get only tidbits, or you get perhaps only articles, the sort of reductive scholarship that you're trying to avoid. So there's no trove of documents about the private in Japanese history. After all, the private is supposed to be hidden.
If there's a trove of documents, then they've been published and they were not meant to be hidden. Of course, there are autobiographies and letters, but comparatively few, and many of these have already been well studied. And in any case, those types of documents do not speak well for the broader societal conceptualizations of privacy and autonomy that I was trying to get at. What I mean is they're not representative.
So for this reason, I steered away, or I mostly steered away from analyzing private spheres of a set of individuals because they would not be representative either. So I settled on a collection of case studies of spheres or spaces that appeared to tolerate autonomy or tolerate independence and afforded people a measure of freedom from public oversight. So that's how I came to organize the book. As far as the layout and the structure of the book goes, I started with three short chapters that conceptualize the private in Japanese history, meaning definitions of public and private, and then a chapter on the private in Edo, and then chapter or short chapter on the private in Meiji Taishou period.
And then after that, I have nine more chapters, which are case studies of autonomy. There are three chapters on the Edo period, and I look at peripheral spaces in one chapter, in another, I look at childhood, and in the third, I look at the arts, self interrogation and self-intargation and self-indulgence in the arts. It's calm. And then moving on to the next part, there are three chapters on aspects of Meiji Taishou era.
I look at deviant individuals, and then I move on to two chapters on education and individuality. And then the final chapter is look at leisure, which is an obvious place to look to find people enjoying privacy and autonomy. So the book covers a ton of ground, and 12 relatively short chapters jumping around to a multitude of topics. And much of the time I was writing this book, I heard voices in my head telling me that this topic was not academically viable.
This topic is toxic, and that by writing it, I was just inviting a storm of criticism and accusations about it, essentialistic scholarship and so forth. But eventually I told myself to just ignore those voices in my head, and in the end I did, I think there's a lot of value in taking on these macro level projects, looking at something from 30,000 feet and then doing one's best to do it. And then doing one's best to try to explain it, even if that explanation can never be comprehensive or can never be complete. One of the things I was amazed by was the innovation, the level of innovation of all these case studies.
So I actually read one of the articles on Negi-C, how its residents formed almost a small community on themselves. So I thought at that time when I read the article, I thought your next project was going to be something about reclusion, and I got very excited about it. But as I was reading this book, I noticed how some of these cases, or similar cases may have been mentioned by other scholars in other studies, but somehow in this book, they all come back to the theme of public and private, which they come back together seamlessly, which was so amazing. So I'm really glad that you ignored that voice in your head and went on with this book.
Yeah, well, we'll see what happens. We'll see what sort of reviews it gets. There may indeed be a storm of criticism out there, waiting. But that's okay.
That's constructive also. Nonetheless, I'm glad this book is out there. It was really rewarding. The process of writing and researching it was quite rewarding, and I had almost every on a daily basis, little epiphanies that really made it exciting to work on this.
Indeed, so to get to a bit of details in the book, one of the essential purposes, as you mentioned, is to define public and private in a Japanese context. How would you describe them now, and how do they differ from the conventional Western understanding of public and private? Yeah, so defining public and private. This called for extensive discussion, and it's one reason why I needed three chapters to contextualize the book's topic before I got into the case studies themselves.
So I discussed public and private, not in the Habermasian sense that we in the West take for granted. Habermas talks about public spheres in the context of modernization, westernization as democratic spaces where private citizens can voluntarily come together and discuss matters that interest them. In Japan, it's the terms, Oyake, or koh, public, and then Watakshi, or she, private, that I looked at. And I used those terms to define public and private.
And they have different meanings on the meaning shift over time. Koh, or Oyake, refers to officialdom, or the state, or the government, or secular political authority. And then she, or Watakshi, refers to contexts beyond that, or free obligations to that type of authority. And it refers particularly to the free pursuit of self-interest.
So, you know, the private, or she, or Watakshi is constantly referred to as a subordinate to the public, or even absent from Japanese society. Some scholars have called the private sphere paltry and unworthy, or they call it amorphous residue. These are actual quotes, descriptions of people used to describe private spheres. And one can debate, I suppose, whether this is true or not, one can debate the relative position vis-a-vis, you know, the private vis-a-public.
But there's no doubt that Watakshi and Oyake, the public and the private, do have a relationship. They hold each other in orbit. They are interdependent. And so it's not relationships that I'm looking at in this book.
That is very interesting. So I was really intrigued by part two in which we talked about individuality in the Edo period. Not, not. That's not because I specialize in Edo period, but it reminds me of another book from a while ago that talks about individuality in nativism's thinkers.
But Peter Naskal, but your perspective is more focused on self-indulgence and self-interication. Could you elaborate on this a bit? Yeah, so in contrast to nativist scholars or near-confusion scholars that assert their individuality by writing texts, and in the course of writing texts carve out distinctive discursive spaces or ideological spaces for themselves as individuals. In contrast to that, I look at societal spaces where anyone might explore autonomy.
The ones I look at are peripheral spaces, suburbs, like Nagishi, that's one of them. And these spaces enjoy remarkable administrative freedom. Many were in between spaces or in between jurisdictions. They were neither parts of cities nor parts of the countryside.
And many of them were without clear administrative oversight. And this afforded them some degree of freedom denied to other types of spaces. I also look at childhood as a period of comparative autonomy. Of course, childhood and child rearing, child experience varied tremendously by class.
But children were remarkably unsupervised in natopeurial boys, especially benefited from this much more than girls. They were expected to learn by watching and emulating their siblings, their older siblings and their older peers. And commoner children moved around quite freely and were largely unpunished until around the age of seven. And even after the age of seven, between the age of seven and the age of majority, which is usually around the age of 15, they were learning how to balance their childhood freedoms with various responsibilities to the family and to the community.
So I posit that childhood, to varying degrees, was also one of these spheres of autonomy. And then I look at self-indulgence and self-interrogation among artists and writers, boonging, specifically. Many of these people produced self-portraits that are not widely known. A surprising number of them wrote autobiographies or autobiographical journals or texts of some sort.
Many of them referenced themselves in their poetry and other writings. So I find this artistic and literary self-interrogation become increasingly common during the last century of the Europeriod, especially in the last decades. And to me, this is a tangible turning inward that really anticipated the more structured inward turn that would happen later in the Meiji period and Tae Shoe period inspired by Western artists and writers. And so for me, this phenomenon clearly reflected a desire for greater autonomy and the kind of self-indulgence in the self, in the private self, rather.
That's a really good point. And then moving on to part three and part four, you deal with modern Japan. So you're especially looking to public individuality and education. So how did the relationship among them change after the establishment of the major government, or perhaps after the establishment of the official education system?
Okay. Yeah. So this relationship between individuality and education in Meiji and Tae Shoe was fascinating. And it took me two chapters to tell this story.
In short, when the Meiji government established a modern education system in the early 1870s, it looked to various educational models, kind of, educational models, pedagogical models being used in the West. Developmental education, or Kajatsu Kyu-kuku, was popular at this time. And that particular pedagogy rejected the notion of children as empty vessels, and the notion that education should be a one-way transmission of knowledge from the teacher to the student. It was a child-centered pedagogy.
It treated teachers as facilitators and children as the primary agents of their own education. So from the standpoint of developmental education, the goal of schooling was the child's individual and moral development. It fostered individuality. It held that individuality was paramount.
And many Japanese educators and many Japanese school districts enthusiastically embraced this idea, at least in theory, and some within the government as well embraced it. But this principle of respecting individuality that was so popular, at least in theory at this time, also conflicted with the nationalistic top-down reforms being advanced by Mori Yawini, who was the first education minister. Those reforms came in the mid 1880s, 1890s, and by the turn of the century, the major government was issuing directives that acknowledged the importance of honoring student individuality, but also at the same time having teachers correct student individuality. Students' individuality was actually being monitored and recorded by teachers in individuality charts.
And it even became incorporated into grading and became a criterion for graduation. So in other words, we see a process by which child-centered individuality becomes transformed into state-dictated individuality. And I refer to this as the development of public, what I call public individuality at this time. I thought that was a very brilliant way to call it.
As I was reading that part, I actually was reminded of this recent piece of news in Japan where they, I think it was in the middle school, they forced their students to, die their hair black, even though their natural hair color was brown. And so would you say these implements of public individuality in the major enticeo period have any effects on modern Japanese education system, like right now? Yes, absolutely. The government still continues to pay lip service to fostering student individuality throughout the post-war period.
And in to today, every decade or two, they reissue the same sort of declaration that education needs to honor student individuality and so forth. But actually in terms of actual pedagogies, nothing really seems to change, nothing but it seems to happen. The example of students being forced to die their hair is a perfect example of that. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I hope maybe one day they'll actually encourage real individuality. Well, we'll see. You mentioned this flustering individuality, flustering morality.
One of the interesting things you mentioned in the book is how the changing, how, how privacy was understood, as well as the way that morality and duty was understood in this context. Could you talk more about this? Sure. So you can see changes in the concept of privacy and duty by, for example, looking at how leisure changed over the course of the 19th century, or the long 19th century, I should say.
In pre-major Japan leisure had been conceptualized through terms like a sobi play and konoshimi enjoyment, which were generally unstructured activities. So, you could even look at them as a respite from content. So typical activities at this time would be going to hot springs, going on pilgrimage, pilgrimages, poetry, composition, tea ceremony, going to festivals and so forth. All of these activities occurred in social settings rather than in private settings.
But modernization created a new dichotomy between work and leisure, or between work and leisure contexts, western, the western residents in Japan. In the major period, introduced concepts of leisure wherein vacationing and general recreation occurred in private settings. So, leisure was considered separate from work, a separate counterpart to work. It was to be enjoyed during prescribed hours, off-duty hours, and in specified off-duty spaces.
But as Japanese accepted this new western concept of leisure as a private undertaking, they also set about instructing each other how to do it. Newspapers, magazines, books, and even later on the government itself published a huge body of material that taught people how to vacation correctly, where, and how to vacation correctly, how to practice leisure, and so on. So, in other words, it took this newfound private sphere of leisure and imposed upon it nearly as much oversight as it did on public contexts. And this goes for school children as well.
School children summer vacations as well were supervised by their schools and by their teachers to a surprising degree. That is very interesting to hear. And does that, so I want to bring up this, the old tale of collectivism and individualism. Even though we don't want to reinforce that stereotype or stereotypical reading of Japanese culture, how do you think collectivism and individualism, if they can function as a contradicting pair in this case of fostering morality or, let's say, supervised leisure, supervised entertainment?
Does that connect to the, I guess, collectivist parts of Japanese society? So, these collectivist parts of Japanese society, this trope of collectivism, I mean, you see that forming now at this moment in Japanese history. The moment I'm referring to, of course, is Meiji Taisho. It's at that moment that I think these stereotypes are born and that they are developed.
It's at that moment when the public and the private are being negotiated or renegotiated. They're bumping together and people are trying to figure out where is their privacy, where is their autonomy, and this newly forming modernizing society that Japan is building? There are new private spheres opening up. So, individuality and education, that I mentioned, leisure, that I just mentioned.
The home, the home as well, becomes a new, so private sphere in the sense that the home now becomes a place of refuge from society. But with these new private spheres opening up, there also simultaneously being eroded by public oversight, by officialdom and so forth. So, these are negotiated spaces and that's what's so fascinating to me about this particular historical moment. And where does the dust settles?
Where does control lie? Does control lie with the individual or does control lie with the state or with the societal group? You have to kind of, when the dust settles, you have to kind of go back to each one of these contexts and try to discern the degree or rediscover the relationship between public and private and what is transpired and how that relationship has been redefined by the process of modernization. That's very intriguing, that this trope that we all know nowadays being a byproduct of modernization and to diving this further.
Why do you think did the state feel the necessity to supervise individuality? What was the larger context? What were the larger purpose in this whole public individuality problem? Yes, well, that's an enormous question.
It's a question I didn't go into in too much detail in the book because there's so much to say and there's so many different answers. I think to that question, I think the short answer is that the Meiji oligarchs came to power in 1868 without any clear vision of what they wanted to do with the country, without any clear vision of how to govern and what they wanted the country to be. And so they had to immediately assert their authority. I think there was some sort of neurosis going on there perhaps among these newly empowered oligarchs.
What are we doing here in power? Do we deserve to be here? Now what do we do? We cannot reveal to the general public that we have no clear vision of how to govern now.
And so under these circumstances naturally, they wanted to open the yet democratized but at the same time they also needed to firmly demonstrate their control and their political authority, their right to govern. And by the 1880s, 1890s that became increasingly more authoritarian. I think there was increasingly less trust in people to govern themselves, increasingly less trust in democratic ideals. And well, we all know what happened by the 1930s.
We all know what direction this went in. So, yeah. Indeed. So your book is very rich and the use of materials and case studies.
Were there any of these cases and materials that particularly stood out to you during the research? Case studies that particularly stood out, I think the case of individuality education and individuality charts that I already described is particularly revealing because it illustrates how Meiji leadership and society generally embraced this Western concept that was wholly inconsistent with Japanese traditional practice and then made it their own converted it into something completely new. So much has been written on Japanese modernization, speculating on how Japan was able to transform itself so quickly and successfully as a modern society. And this case study, I think is a perfect illustration of that process of adaptation or rather domestication of the domestication of foreign ideas.
Yes, I really loved that part too. But also really liked the end of the book in the epilogue. You talk about how the Japanese government has been coping with this pandemic and how it systematically fails to find a balance between private and public interests. Would you like to comment on that?
Yeah, so the government has been failing to find this balance between private and public interests I think for a long time. It's an institution that continues to abide by traditional political culture. But at the same time, it's also forced to adhere to this American style constitution. And so there's this implicit contradiction in Japanese politics.
And I think this is one reason why Japanese people feel such apathy for politics and such distrust in their own politicians. But I think they find a much better balance between private and public themselves. Private spheres are palpable in Japan today. They may not appear as robust as in many Western nations.
And they also look very different than they do in Western nations. But they serve the same functions equally well, I think. I begin the book in the prologue of the book. I tell the story about seeing an office lady standing outside in front of the National Diet Library very early in the morning.
And she's singing. It appears to me she's rehearsing for a recital. She's quite a talented singer. And she's just belting out this music and these lyrics in a very unself-conscious way.
And it was clear to me that she had nowhere else to rehearse. She couldn't be rehearsing her on home because there's no privacy there. And she had nowhere to go. So she went to this, well, a semi-abandoned place in front of the National Diet Library to do that.
And she was treated as invisible. She was afforded complete privacy to do this by people like me who are sitting there waiting to get into the library. Now, if she were in New York City, that would not happen. If she were in New York City, she would not be given afforded this type of privacy, I think.
She would be even more visible to pedestrians. People would stop and stare at her and point at her and think so, but not so in Japan. So, so private spheres are out there. They're ubiquitous.
And it's time, I think, that they are acknowledged and better understood. Yes, that's a really good point. Now, you mentioned in the beginning that your next project is going to be completely different from this one. Do you have any leads on where it's going?
Well, I'll just say that, yeah, I've become interested in animals, non-human animals, and the history of things like livestock and pets and animal care. In Japanese history. And again, this is a brand new topic for me to study, but I really enjoyed it. I found some really interesting rich primary sources.
And so I'm excited to see what comes out of that. Wow, definitely I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, well, thanks. Well, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation.
Thank you, Jingi. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for joining us. And while listeners, to learn more about the history of individually and autonomy in Japan, make sure to check out this book by Dr.
William Bredger, Japan's Private Spheres, Autonomy in Japanese History. This is Jingi Li from New Books on Japanese Studies, and I will see you in the next episode. A Safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my car doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
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