Like No Other: Exceptionalism and Nativism in Early Modern Japan by Mark Thomas McNally (review)

Names carry such a surplus of meaning that they risk having connotations of which the user may be unaware. One example is "nativism," a term that for Japanologists often refers to the various schools generally subsumed under the label kokugaku. By this they mean everything from the study of ancient Japanese texts and the lived experience of Japanese people to iterations of the belief that Japanese civilization is superior to Chinese and all other civilizations. Depending on the scholar, nativism starts with either Keichū or Kada no Azumamaro and ends with the creation of the modern state. While acknowledging that he too used nativism in this fashion, Mc-Nally now states that he, and everyone else, is in error.

Nativism should not be used to define the study of Japan's past or culture by figures such as Motoori Norinaga or Hirata Atsutane, for reasons that McNally derives from the way the term has appeared in U.S. history and anthropology. First, it is largely unknown outside of U.S. academe. Second, it has negative connotations because within the U.S. academy, it denotes anti-immigrant xenophobic social movements. Third, because in the United States it is always associated with the arrival of large numbers of immigrants and the rejection of them by the native-born, it does not fit eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan, which lacked direct contact with foreigners. When anthropologists use the term, they expect nativism to arise only within the context of colonization. From McNally's perspective, this means that the sonnō-jōi (revere the emperor, expel the barbarians) movement of the 1850s and 1860s represents the sole instance of nativism in Tokugawa Japan.

Instead of nativism, McNally prefers the term "exceptionalism" to describe all the figures in Tokugawa intellectual history who promoted a view of Japan as equal or superior to China, whether they pursued Japanese or Chinese studies. Exceptionalism has already been applied to late twentieth-century proponents of Nihonjinron, but because Nihonjinron has such negative connotations, scholars who study premodern Japan have avoided using it. From McNally's perspective, more important are the positive connotations that exceptionalism carries in the U.S. context—claims of superiority, uniqueness, and self-praise. Moreover, by claiming that Japan too exhibited exceptionalist thinking from the seventeenth century on, McNally attacks the assumption that only the United States has developed an exceptionalist ideology or that only the United States is truly exceptional. His ultimate goal is to put Tokugawa intellectual history into the mainstream of comparative history by using it to redefine what is meant by exceptionalism and to challenge the conclusions of U.S. historians.

In building his argument, McNally ranges widely over Japanese history and Western theorists. Although his target is the way that historians have defined what for lack of a better word he calls "Kokugaku" (capitalization his), he focuses on scholars with more of a Confucian bent, from Fujiwara Seika to Aizawa Seishisai. Important to his analysis are the terms "emics and etics" that were coined by the linguist Kenneth Pike and picked up by anthropologists. The first means the particular knowledge of the observed; the second refers to an observer's point of view that "describes general phenomena that are common to all cultures" (p. 13). McNally then turns to Marvin Harris for a notion of "cultural materialism" that by privileging an etic-centered approach tries to make anthropology a scientific discipline. McNally too wants to make his interpretation of Japanese thought scientific and hence comparable to other cultures. In addition to the anthropologists and historians who have analyzed nativism and exceptionalism in the U.S. context, McNally calls on Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard in his effort to deconstruct the nativist paradigm and build a new one—an eclectic mix indeed.

McNally spends most of two chapters explaining what is meant by nativism and exceptionalism...