Prewar Japanese Studies of Republican China

13. 1972). (This volume also contains essays on CCP and KMT land policy both before and after 1949. Most •f Furushima's chapter .has been translated into English under the title "Village Society in ~rerevolutionary China'' in The Developing Economies, 10#3 (Sept. 1972). Other English-language ,ournals publJ.shing research on China by Japanese scholars in·clude Acta Asiatica, Memoirs of ~he Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, Annals of Hitotsubashi Academy, East Asian Cultural Studies, and Proceedings of the International Congress of Orientalists.) * * PREWAR JAPANESE STUDIES OF REPUBLICAN CHINA Toshua Fogel, Columbia University * * "For what I was called academic (for writing) during the war I was called reactionary afterward." Wada Sei (Kiyoshi) Shortly after catastrophic defeat in WWII, reevaluation of the prewar sinological legacy began to appear in Japanese scholarly publications, an~lyzing the role certain prewar academic ideas about China had played in the Japanese government's military and political thinking about expansion onto the Mainland. One of the earliest and most celebrated postwar essays was written in 1946 by Professor Nohara Shiro; 1 it fiercely attacked the views of Japan's greatest prewar sinologist Naito Konan ( rt'l A\ ;t;~ ifl · , 1866-1934) as politically motivated and a rationalization for imperialism. Thereaft~r a flood of analyses appeared both attacking and defending Naito, as well as other prewar-China scholars such as Shiratori Kurakichi , Tsuda S~kichi, Kato Shigeshi, Oda Yorozu, Inaba Iwakichi, and Yano Jinichi. In the early 1960s the opposition to the Ford Foundation's funding of the Toyo Bunko again set off a debate over the relationship of politics and sinology which inevitably reopened debate regarding prewar scholarship. Arguments continue through the present day. I would like to take a closer look at the prewar scholarship on 20th century China and take up some of the issues raised in the postwar reappraisal. Founding of the "Tokyo" and "Kyoto" Schools . When the History Department of Tokyo Imperial University (Todai) was founded in March, 1886, Ludwig Reiss, a disciple of Leopold Ranke, came to Japan to help teach "how it really was" (wie es eigentlich gewesen). At that time Japanese studies of Asia were still dominated by kangaku <1 ~ ), a methodological school which p~laced stress on textual exegesis, verification of names and dates, "history" at the smallest, least comprehensive level - a decad•t descendent of the once vital koshogaku (~ ~ ~ ). Thus, the positivist import found fertile soil at Todai. Reiss' prize student, Shiratori Kurakichi