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TWO A Voice of Resistance Tsubouchi Shōyō The critique that Tsubouchi Shōyō (1858–1935) moved against Western aesthetics was directly related to two major events that shook the Japanese intelligentsia during the last two decades of the nineteenth century: the arrival in Japan of Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853–1908) and Nakae Chōmin’s translation of E. Véron’s L’Esthétique. Fenollosa reached Japan in 1878 as a lecturer of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University where he played a major role in introducing Hegelian thought.1 He presented the major issues of his philosophy of art in a speech that he gave to the members of the Dragon Pond Society (Ryūchikai) in May 1882.2 The text was later published in Japanese as Bijutsu Shinsetsu (The True Conception of the Fine Arts, November 1882) by Ōmori Ichū (1844–1908), who based his translation on notes taken during the lecture. Fenollosa’s talk was a summary of several lectures he had given in Tokyo to artists and scholars since April of the previous year.3 In his speech Fenollosa argued for the autonomous status of the arts which, rather than fulfilling a practical purpose, had to be appreciated for their ornamental value (sōshoku). This argument contributed to clarifying the difference between arts (bijutsu) and crafts (kōgei), whose independent and practical aspects were rarely kept separate in Japan. Fenollosa stressed the idea that the main function of art was to please the heart and elevate the spirit. But art was not simply play—a notion that would still privilege 38 1. “Although the full details of Fenollosa’s activities in Japan are difficult to determine, his influence on early Meiji connoisseurship and art appreciation was a decisive one. His lectures—often adaptations of Hegelian theory—threw new light on the nature and importance of Japanese art, and opened Japanese eyes to the necessity of reexamining and revaluing their heritage. Fenollosa, carried away by his enthusiasm, even went so far as to argue the superiority of Japanese painting over Western oil painting.” See Uyeno Naoteru, ed., Japanese Arts and Crafts in the Meiji Era (Tokyo: Pan-Pacific Press, 1958), p. 18. 2. The Ryūchikai, founded in 1879 by Japanese artists in traditional styles, was headed by Sano Tsunetami and Kawase Hideharu. It was renamed the Japanese Art Society (Nihon Bijutsu Kyōkai) in 1887. 3. The original text in English has not yet been found. The Japanese translation by Ōmori appears in Aoki Shigeru and Sakai Tadayasu, eds., Bijutsu, NKST 13 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989), pp. 35–65. the idea of practical utility in life. It was not a plaything provided with the purpose of bringing joy to the user. The goodness of art was not located in its ability to produce jouissance. Rather, it produced jouissance because of its independent goodness. Fenollosa strongly restated this point in a later series of lectures on the theory of literature that he gave at Tokyo’s Higher Normal School on 25 January 1898.4 In these lectures Fenollosa introduced the heavy language of metaphysics in an attempt to explain the world in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity, interiority and exteriority, universality and particularity, being and not-being. Following the dialectic of negative theology, Fenollosa proposed four negative propositions in his definition of literature. First: Literature is not its utility, and yet it partakes of some sort of inherent value.5 This statement echoes the third moment of Kant’s analytic of the beautiful, according to which “beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived without any representation of a purpose.”6 Second: Literature is not constituted by pleasure, and yet there is something called “literary pleasure.”7 Here Fenollosa follows the Kantian notion A Voice of Resistance 39 4. See “Preliminary Lectures on the Theory of Literature—Higher Normal School—Tokyo—Jan. 25th ’98,” in Akiko Murakata, ed., The Ernest F. Fenollosa Papers: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, vol. 3: Literature (Tokyo: Museum Press, 1987), pp. 115–162 [hereafter PLTL]. 5. “I shall first maintain that the essential thing in literature is not its utility. If, by utility, we mean the furthering of ordinary human interests, then some writings which have it and some writing which do not have it are equally literature. . . . In literature, however, the peculiar value cannot lie in some outside end for which the book is valuable. Literary value is no adventitious or...

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