The Ideology of Kokugo: Nationalizing Language in Modern Japan

Chapter 5 Kokugo and Kokka

87 CHAPTER 5 Kokugo and Kokka 5-1. Politicizing Kokugo In June 1894, on his return from three and a half years of study in Europe, Ueda was appointed professor of linguistics at the Imperial University. It was only two months before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War.1 During that year, Ueda gave two public lectures, “Kokugo to kokka to” (The National Language and the Nation-State) in October and “Kokugo kenkyū ni tsuite” (About Kokugo Research) in November, that powerfully impressed the audience. Unlike his essays before his study abroad, which were directed to limited groups of scholars of language and literature, these two lectures were meant to appeal to a wider audience, and their written records reveal Ueda’s passion for launching the new field of kokugogaku based on information from Western linguistics. They were published in his essay collection Kokugo no tame (For Kokugo) in the following year (1895; Meiji 28), the title indicating that all of his ideas about language were to be condensed into “kokugo.” In this chapter and the next I will discuss these two lectures, which opened a new stage of Ueda’s activities and represented his ideas about language— “Kokugo to kokka to” in this chapter and “Kokugo kenkyū ni tsuite” in chapter 6. Ueda’s lecture “Kokugo to kokka to” was quite daring because nobody before him had so directly connected the concept of kokugo to the nation-state. Though some scholars had emphasized the spiritual sublimity of kokugo in relation to the nation, Ueda presented a completely novel idea that justified, in scholarly terms, the internal and organic connection between kokugo and kokka (Ueda 1897, 1–28; quoted in Ochiai 1968, 108–113). The most crucial difference from the kokugaku scholars’ viewpoint was that Ueda first postulated the organic connection between kokugo, a national language , and kokka, a nation-state, as a universal concept, not limited to Japan, and then explained the uniqueness and particularity of Japan. Remarking that he was not a scholar of “nationalism,” Ueda opened the lecture saying that kokugo itself could not be discussed without considering kokka first. 88 Ueda Kazutoshi and His Ideas about Language According to Ueda, kokka, a nation-state, consists of four pillars or elements: land, race (“ethnicity” in today’s terms), unity, and law. The third element, unity, further consists of five subelements: history and customs, political principles, religions, language, and education. Thus, Ueda attempted to define the universal nature of the concept of nation-state and to analyze its attributes, though he presented them as already proven, saying that the first four elements were the determining factors for the rise and fall of a nation-state (108). Ueda must have adapted this argument from the Prussian Staatslehre (doctrine of the state), with which he became familiar during his study in Germany. His intention, however, was not to formulate objectively the creation process or the law of development of a nation, but to paint the ideal picture of a nation-state and to convince the audience of how closely Japan matched such an ideal. Because of this intention, Ueda’s discourse on kokka came to be strangely distorted. (It is still to be learned how much of this distortion emanated from the Prussian Staatslehre.) This distortion is obvious in Ueda’s heavy emphasis on race, history, and language as among the basic ingredients of a nation-state: these elements are the least susceptible to human manipulation and most useful for Ueda’s intention to show the nation-state as a natural creation. The significance of this lecture was not Ueda’s not-so-innovative discussion of the language itself, but the manifestation of his ideology in an effort to turn this most artificial creation, kokka, into a natural one. Ueda contended that extreme multiethnic situations encouraged unpatriotic traits in a nation, citing the Austro-Hungarian Empire as an example of the decline of a nation resulting from discord among many ethnic groups. The Austro-Hungarian Empire would become a frequently used example in later studies of languages and races, especially by Hoshina Kōichi, typically as a negative model for warning of the danger of multiracialism or multilingualism . Ueda already had such a view, which, as we will later discuss, Hoshina loyally folded into his work on language policy. Ueda, nonetheless, did say, “We must not determine that one nation consists solely of one race.” Many European countries are multiethnic nations. However, Ueda continued, even in those countries it...