H381 Modern Japan
shogun - short for sei-i tai shogun, or "barbarian quelling generalissimo"
daimyo - warlord, i.e., powerful regional military ruler who controls his own
domain or han. Appoximately 265 exist in late Tokugawa times
bakufu - lit., "tent government," English equivalent = the shogunate
bakuhan-taisei - the bakuhan system, refers to the mixture of central authority
and local autonomy which characterizes the Tokugawa polity
bakumatsu - refers to the end of Tokugawa period, usually 1853-1868
han - a feudal domain or fief, ruled by a daimyo
sankin-kotai - alternate attendance system requiring daimyo to spend half their
time at the shogun's castle in Edo "in attendance" on the shogun
tenka - the realm, the political order
fudai daimyo - the most trusted, most dependable vassals of Tokugawa house
shimpan daimyo - the related families or collateral lines of Tokugawa line
tozama - the "outside" of least trusted daimyo who never became allies
of Ieyasu before the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600
hatamoto - bannermen or liege vassals of shogun
gokenin - housemen, inner core of daimyo followers
roju - the Council of elders, advisers to shogun, usually senior fudai daimyo
chonin - townsmen, usually merchants, artisans
Kokugaku - School of National or Native Learning
Rangaku - School of Dutch Learning
Kogaku - School of Ancient (Chinese) Learning
Oyomei - Wang Yang-ming School or brand of Confucianism
Oshio Heihachiro - minor bakufu official from Osaka who led a failed urban
uprising of commoners against the shogunal government in 1837
uchikowashi - urban riots
nomin-ikki - peasant uprsings
okage-mairi - pilgrimages of thanksgiving
naiyu, gaikan - "troubles at home, dangers from abroad," taken from
Chinese classics describing dynastic fall
"Able Daimyo" - describes leaders of large han, either tozama or
shimpan domains, traditionally excluded from decision-making who want to have
more of a political voice in the face of the foreign threat
sonno-joi - "revere the emperor, expel the barbarian"
kokutai - national polity, refers to Japan’s unique monarchy descended
fron Sun-Goddess, Amaterasu-no-omikami
kobu-gattai - idea of politically linking military (bakufu) with Imperial Court
through marriage
This may be a stretch, but there is a fascinating article by a linguist about
how the Japanese struggled to come up with linguistic equivalents for such western
concepts as society, individual, the world, etc. See "The Concept of Translation
in Meiji Japan" by Niculina Nae where she observes, for example, that:
From the point of view of individual liberation, the Meiji enlightenment
played in
Japan the role the Renaissance played in Europe, where individualism was “a
social
system in which the individual is ideally alone in a secularized world, freed
from the bonds
of family and tradition” (Walker 1979:6). However, while in Europe ideas
about
society, individual, freedom, etc. took centuries to develop, Japanese intellectuals
expected to assimilate them in a very short period of time. New concepts were
rapidly
introduced. Nevertheless, the translators were confronted with the absence
of not only
translation equivalents for these concepts, but what is more, they discovered
that the
Japanese language actually lacks the realities behind these words. As David
Pollack
points out, Meiji Japan embarked upon a quest for “ a viable sense of
its own identity
in the face of the West and, [...] within the socio-political terms of the
need to invent, for
the sake of modernization, an analogue to the Western “self” as
the necessary precursor to
the political concepts of “liberty,” “freedom,” and “rights”
which are founded upon it”
(1992:55).
The disruption of Japanese cultural codes—so far dominated by Buddhist
and
Confucian dogmas, at the same time with the rapid introduction of totally
unknown
value systems, made them become obsessed with questions like “Who am
I?” or
“What is my place in the world?” However, says Pollack, before they
“could ask ‘Who
am I?’ they had first to ask an even more fundamental question: ‘What
is an I?’”
(1992:54). The absence of a new kind of self urged translators to create a
new
concept, modeled after its original. This process resulted in the dissemination
of
abstract and opaque terms, whose sense was unintelligible to the common reader,
and, as Tsuda Soukichi points out, by means of intellectuals’ tacit understanding,
Japanese translation of new concepts preserved the original concept, while
changing
only its name. This resulted in most cases in translations that were difficult
to
understand. According to Tsuda, Japanese translation of new concepts had the
formula S'[Sr1/Sd1] – S"[Sr2/Sd1], where S' is the sign in the source
language, with
its components, signifier (Sr1) and signified (Sd1), and S" is the translated
sign with
a new signifier (Sr2) and the same signified (Sd1). It can be said that translation
in
The Meiji era encountered two major problems which are worth discussing here:
one is
the absence of translation equivalents for major Western concepts, and the
other one
is the acceptability of the newly created terms.