The key to a modern Japan at the end of the nineteenth century was all in the language, according to Keith Vincent, assistant professor of comparative literature and East Asian Studies at New York University.
In Vincent’s lecture on Monday at Russell House, “The ‘Human,’ His ‘Rights’ and other Neologisms in Modernizing Japan (1868-1889)”, he spoke about the discourse that took place among Japanese thinkers regarding how to modify their language in order to keep up with the modernization of Western countries.
“Language reform was indispensable to competing with the Western powers,” Vincent said.
He also discussed how Japanese writers tried to purify their language by purging it of its strong Chinese influences, even though notable Chinese traces can still be found in the language today.
Vincent, who received a Ph.D in Japanese literature from Columbia University and whose major interests include modern Japanese literature and pop culture, queer theory and history of translation and language reform, chose to frame his talk between 1868 and ending with 1889.
He chose the date 1868 as a beginning marker, he said, because this was the year that the shogun, a military strongman, ceded power to the Japanese emperor in what is called the “Meiji Restoration.”
According to Professor of East Asian Studies Stephen Angle, who was present at the lecture, the restored Japanese Emperor ruled with a small group of elites who were set on modernizing Japan.
Vincent’s end mark for his lecture, 1889, was the year that Japan instituted their first constitution, which closely resembled those found in Western Europe at the time. Vincent thus suggested that the period between 1868 and 1889 in Japan was a time of shedding old ways and ideas and incorporating new ones, among them the concept of human rights.
Vincent spoke of the difficulties Japanese people encountered with their language in trying to understand the concept of “human rights” when there was no existing character to convey such a meaning.
Derived from Chinese, the Japanese word for rights, phonetically, is “kenri.” “[Vincent’s lecture] was suggestive of the limits of our knowledge of what human rights is,” said Henry Abelove, director of the Center for the Humanities, who introduced Vincent and organized the lecture. It is the second of this year’s Fall Lecture Series.
“Just at the start of his career, [Vincent] is as painstakingly careful as he is brilliant,” Abelove said.
Vincent said that some Japanese writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth century even considered abandoning Japanese for English.
“Modern Japanese can be seen as translated English, German, French, since it was forced to ingest so many grammatical forms and concepts,” he said.
Vincent also discussed Japanese in the context of sexuality and gender roles. Traditionally, only men were educated and able to write in Chinese. Women wrote only in a Japanese vernacular.
Among the Japanese writers and thinkers that Vincent discussed, many expressed a fervent desire to unite written and spoken Japanese – this idea was called, “genbun’itchi.”
According to Professor of Philosophy Elise Springer, who was present at the lecture, some Japanese writers believed that the Japanese language had lost its purity because it had become too far removed from the spoken word, and that a purer form of language would express an individual’s gender, sex identity and national identity.
“He was very knowledgeable on the subject,” said Johanna Goetzel ’07. “It was very interesting to see how gender is constructed through language.”
“I think one of Professor’s main points was that there is no universal moral language,” Angle said, “and when you try to run one moral language against another, it’s complicated.”
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