Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Imagining China in Tokugawa Japan: Legends, Classics, and Historical Terms by Wai-ming Ng

2020; Sophia University; Volume: 75; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mni.2020.0033

1880-1390

Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi,

Chinese history and philosophy

Reviewed by: Imagining China in Tokugawa Japan: Legends, Classics, and Historical Terms by Wai-ming Ng Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi Imagining China in Tokugawa Japan: Legends, Classics, and Historical Terms. By Wai-ming Ng. SUNY Press, 2019. 288 pages. Hardcover, $95.00; softcover, $32.95. Wai-ming Ng, professor of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, previously published this collection of informative essays in Chinese in 2015 at Tsinghua University Press. Perhaps carrying over a warning directed at that linguistic-cultural readership about orientalism in reverse, he tells us that Japan was not "an overseas branch of Chinese culture," so we should not "condemn" Tokugawa Confucianism and Chinese studies as "deviations from the original teachings." These subjects deserve academic scrutiny in their own right and on their own terms (pp. xxvi, 177). Trained at Princeton University and the University of Tokyo, Ng displays strong points in traditional sinology—a close reading and deciphering of classical texts—but he also reveals its limits for historical research. Below, I hope to show what we in that scholarly discipline gain, and lose, from his method. It is always easier to review a book than to write one, especially when COVID-19 blocks access to reference materials, including Ng's first book,1 so I apologize here if I misrepresent his views or unfairly detract from his findings. [End Page 355] Let us place Imagining China in Tokugawa Japan in a broad Western academic context. Adopting a sinological approach with no trace of sinocentric conceit, Ng anchors his topic in a four-millennial great tradition of East Asian civilization, what he calls "the Sinosphere" (p. 176). Within it, mostly Han Chinese dynasties interacted with and imparted key cultural elements to nearby peoples, one of which was a Confucian value system expressed in "literary Sinitic" (p. 177), or classical writings in kanji, which served as the area's lingua franca. But this overarching great tradition, I would say, has lost appeal in academic study and university teaching due to factors such as the relaxation or total abolition of Chinese- and Japanese-language requirements in graduate training and demands for theoretical sophistication made first by social scientists and, most recently, by literary critics. By contrast, "studying China and Japan from an East Asian context" is Ng's "academic vision" (p. ix), one he is linguistically gifted to pursue. Ng goes back to the sources—texts in classical Chinese and Japanese transliteration—although in punctuated printed editions. In this regard, he differs from old-school Japanese historians who ferret out archival materials and unearth raw documents, often in brush-written cursive script. This point is crucial. Unpublished primary sources, read in tandem with secondary studies, enable "historical revisionists" (in the good sense) to refute biases in the received wisdom often accorded to classical texts. Moreover, Ng is seeking to show how Chinese elements entered Tokugawa culture via literary Sinitic, so he perforce depreciates sources in colloquial Japanese, but these sources are precisely what ethnologists and literary historians value for disclosing a culture anchored in real life and revealed through vocabulary inexpressible in kanji. Examples would be ichibun (sense of honor) and iji (irrational pride), which, it is held, explain bushido more faithfully than that "literary Sinitic" term.2 Thus by design, Ng's method explains Tokugawa thought in part—the part shared with China. Finally, three technical points require notice: the book contains numerous misprints, many of its endnote entries lack corresponding bibliographic references, and a kanji glossary is indispensable even for specialists given the heavy use of Chinese terms, but we find none. Ng laments that in our current state of scholarship, Tokugawa writers are depicted as treating China in a dichotomous manner, either as a role model and mentor inviting emulation by sinophiles who sought the Way, revealed in ancient China but possessing timeless universal truth, or as "the Other," a baneful foil earning rebuke from nativists who protested singularity if not preeminence for indigenous folkways and moral norms (pp. xiii–xxvi). Thus, Ng says, we must "move on to a more sophisticated level of scholarship" pursued from a "cross-cultural perspective" (pp. 175–77). He holds that Tokugawa writers "appropriated," "naturalized," "redefined...