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Cultural Anxiety in East Asian Clouded by “Tradition” and “Modernity”—Based on Chinese Scholars’ Studies on Religion Mixture in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Kirishitanmono

2024; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.18178/ijlll.2024.10.1.495

2972-3108

Ling Qin,

Chinese history and philosophy

In Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s series of Christian-themed works, known as “Kirishitanmono”, the conflicts between Buddhism and Christianity can be seen everywhere. Some Chinese scholars believed that Akutagawa broke down under the burden of the unbelievable speed of westernization in modern Japan because he was closer to the Japanese tradition. The aim of this paper is to revise the problem of this statement. By sorting out the history of both Buddhism and Christianity and using ‘perspective’ stated by Kojin Karatani, it can be revealed that this belief is actually a conceptual misalignment under the East Asian modern perspective, which contains the equivalence between local religion and tradition, as well as Christianity and modernity. Chinese scholars live in similar social and cultural environment as Akutagawa, thus such interpretation was just a repetition of their own perspective rather than an interpretation of Akutagawa’s work. By organizing all the Kirishitanmono of his, Akutagawa’s attitudes towards mixing religions can be shown: at first, he managed to accept foreign culture, only to find that it would leave the root of Japanese culture hanging; later he tried to domesticated foreign religions, finding that this would cause the modernity which the introduction of Christianity brought about dissolute. This paper focuses on this conceptual misalignment in Chinese scholars’ studies, reveals Akutagawa’s real struggle and constructs a new way interpreting the ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in Japanese culture.