Shimada Kenji: Scholar, Tinker, Reader: Selected Writings on the Intellectual History of Modern China by Joshua A. Fogel (review)

In the opening line of his preface to this gem of scholarship, Canada Research Chair Professor Joshua A. Fogel observes, “If the era when Titans roamed the Sinological earth has now passed, then Shimada Kenji島田虔次 (1917-2000) was the last of their breed, at least in Japan” (p. vii). Anyone who knows the world of Sinological scholarship realizes that there are still Titans roaming and Fogel is one of them. With this volume, he has authored, edited, or translated a staggering quantity: over two dozen volumes, beginning with, most notably, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitō Konan (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984). Fogel’s current work stands, arguably, as a variation on that earlier theme, that of border crossings, especially intellectual ones, in East Asian approaches to Sinology. A noteworthy journal that Fogel founded and still edits, Sino-Japanese Studies, is another expression of this dimension of his scholarship. The outstanding quality and breadth of Fogel’s work undoubtedly qualifies him as yet another expression of the group that he has researched, and in the process become one with.

The subject of Fogel’s translation, Shimada Kenji, was a titan of a different sort. As the volume recognizes, Shimada was not a prolific scholar. Indeed, he published relatively little. Yet what he did publish ultimately turned Sinological trends in profoundly new directions if not upside down. Shimada’s first work, The Frustration of Modern Thought in China (Chūgoku ni okeru kindai shii no zasetsu 中国における近代思惟の挫折), published in 1949, was, as Fogel relates, “one of the first (if not the very first) scholarly attempts to take the seemingly eccentric behavior and ideas of Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472-1528) and his many disciples (the left wing of the school of Wang Yangming) seriously.”¹ Shimada’s interests in the left-wing movement grew in part from Naitō Konan’s History of Chinese Historiography 内藤湖南 (Shina shigaku shi 支那史学史, 1949), especially Naitō’s chapter on Li Zhi 李贄 (1527-1602), one of the key figures in the left-wing Wang Yangming movement. Shimada’s work in turn decisively shaped Wang Yangming scholarship outside of Japan. This is apparent, for example, in Wm. Theodore de Bary’s essay, “Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late Ming Thought,” published in Self and Society in Ming Thought (1970).² With the subsequent broadcast of Shimada’s ideas on Ming Neo-Confucianism, emphasizing continuities—rather than ruptures and differences—between Wang Yangming thought and the early-Song ideas of Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200), they achieved a degree of circulation in Western research that few Japanese scholars realize.

Fogel has selected and translated an array of pieces from various sources explaining Shimada’s intellectual puzzle from multiple times and occasions, producing along the way an impressively unified, even excellent, text that is readable as a sort of cubistic intellectual biography. Thus as Shimada relates in “My Naitō Konan” (Watakushi no Naitō Konan私の),³ although a student of Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎 (1904-1980) at Kyoto University, he found himself more attracted to Naitō’s interpretations, especially those focused on Ming philosophical thought, than those of Yoshikawa, who was instead an admirer of Qing philological learning and helped continue the Kyoto University tradition of Sinology as textual exegesis. Shimada’s “An Ill-Matched Disciple” (Nitsukanu deshi似つかぬ弟子),⁴ continues this theme, respectfully characterizing his differences with Yoshikawa in self-deprecating terms regarding his, Shimada’s, own “European complex, a reading-in-horizontal-lines complex” which prompted him to “stealthily take a peek at Descartes or Hegel” while engaged in Sinology. Fogel continues this impressive synthesis of materials in translation making accessible for interested readers some of the inner thoughts and tensions of a Japanese scholar in a slim, highly readable volume the likes of which one rarely finds published by...