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194 JAPAN AND CHINA In 1794, Hara Nan’yō, personal physician to the lord of Mito, sent his newest book manuscript to Fujita Yūkoku. Fujita was young enough to be Hara’s child, but his actual parentage was far less illustrious. The second son of a used-clothes seller in Mito’s castletown, he had shown such prodigious promise as a scholar that at the age of eighteen he was raised to the rank of a warrior and made an editor on Mito’s Dai-Nipponshi historiographical project. Hara hoped that Fujita would write a foreword to his Bokuyokuhen, a learned treatise on infanticide. Fujita obliged him, but in a way that must have shocked the good doctor. His “Indeed, his foreword” was so caustic that Hara never published the book. “The general meaning of this booklet is to deplore that infants are not raised. However, its content is entirely about the alien land (ihō) of China,” Fujita grumbled. Apparently, Hara had written a history of population policy in the chronicles of Chinese statecraft, from the kings of Zhou and Goujian of Yue to the emperors of the Southern Song dynasty. “It then goes on to deplore the moral decay of more recent times. If one lets somebody with just a little learning read this, . . . he will certainly say: ‘In the land of civilization to our west, [such sagely policies] still exist. Only in our Divine Land are they not implemented.’ It is like making a monkey climb up a tree, no different from smearing dirt on dirt.”1 Unflattering comparisons of Japan with China had a long history among Edo-period intellectuals. Earlier in the eighteenth century, several authors writing on infanticide had taken the same approach for which Fujita savaged Hara. Yusa Bokusai’s treatise on raising twins was in the main a recitation of admirable 12 Infanticide and the Geography of Civilization Infanticide and Civilization 195 Chinese precedent.2 Another scholar, Nishikawa Joken, asserted Japan’s equality with its larger neighbor, but elsewhere extolled the same bounties for twin births and held up China as an example more generally for its successful infanticide countermeasures. “In China, too, [infanticide] was frequent in antiquity, but successive generations of sagely emperors issued bans and made rural scholars teach the people that this practice contradicts human ethics. Thanks to these efforts, in the present period there is nobody [in China] who commits this evil deed.”3 Many authors of anti-infanticide pamphlets simply saw themselves as a part of the larger traditions of China, India, and Japan. Gen Senshi (1791) and Sekiguchi Toyotane (1822) could still cite these three countries in a single sentence and without implied contrast, giving them equal weight and honor as the respective homelands of the Sages, the Buddha, and the (Shinto) Gods.4 In the mid–nineteenth century, however, Nativism elevated Shinto over the other two teachings and sometimes associated infanticide with Chinese influences. In 1849, Suzuki Shigetane , the Shinto enthusiast who a few pages ago worried about the military implications of depopulation, echoed the sentiments of his fellow Nativists when he wrote: “It used to be said that burying one’s child out of poverty is a vile custom frequent only among the Chinese, but at some point this evil has moved hither [to Japan], and now very occasionally happens among the poor in remote regions.”5 As Japanese intellectuals labored to recenter the map of civilization on Japan, infanticide was a problem that required explanation. Civilization was a fickle ground on which to attack infanticide. It could be a highly effective argument among people who felt insecure about the status of their region within Japan or of Japan’s status within a wider world; among people confident or defensive about the civilized status of their land, or people tired of measuring themselves against some foreign benchmark, appeals to civilization could have the opposite effect. In such a setting, proposing infanticide countermeasures could be politically difficult because doing so impugned the civilized status of the target region. For a brief historical moment, from about 1868 to 1878, people were open to the idea that their native land was in sore need of civilizing, and in the first years of the Meiji period, infanticide was routinely censured in those terms. After that moment passed, however, it became increasingly disagreeable to point fingers. Just as Fujita’s outburst persuaded Hara Nan’yō not to publish his book, a nation that thought itself civilized seems to have...

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