New Times in Modern Japan

Chapter 1
DISCOVERY OF PASTS
Morse in Japan remains what he has been all his life--a man locked in a silent struggle with time, one whose days are filled with a pursuit of practical truths that can be shared with a world hungry to understand itself.
--Robert A. Rosenstone (1998)
WE ARE QUITE FAMILIAR with the Meiji period as one of considerable transformation of all aspects of life on the archipelago. But its characterization as a move from old to new--as simply exiting from its self-incurred immaturity--obscures the historicity of modernity, that process described above by Rosenstone: a "pursuit of practical truths" for a "world hungry to understand itself." Several steps are necessary to begin that process: first, the idea of immaturity suggests that one's present society is incomplete and living in the past. In other words, there is a recognition of a progressive time and a separation of pasts from present. Second, one must recognize that the world of inadequacy is man-made, not because of a degeneration from some originary ideal, but because of the artificial constructions posed by such primitive ideas and institutions. And third, any attempt to explain this level is dependent upon a different configuration of the whole, a "struggle with time." Now, inherited ideas and men that were the subject of chronicles became the past, which reflected recognition that the aristocratic system is not natural or endowed but anachronistic. These discoveries occurred in Europe from the late medieval period to the nineteenth century.1 During the Tokugawa period, intellectuals began the separation of humans from nature (rangaku) and the formulation of an alternate origin (kokugaku). But this discovery of the past and its separation from the present occurred principally during the Meiji period.
The discovery and separation of the past is one of the central components of the Meiji period. In early Meiji, various practices and ideas that had been connected with the Tokugawa era became the objects from which society would be emancipated. But unlike previous reform efforts, improvement would come through something new rather than a restoration of an ideal located in some pure originary moment. But this transformation of the conceptual order must not be described today within the same temporal ordering that was used to argue for the new. To do so accepts the neutrality, or emptiness, of time. That is, it fails to consider the arguments by scholars who point out that time is not external, but a constituent of and constitutes life. Thomas Luckmann writes,
Time is constitutive of human life in society. Of course it is also constitutive of human life in nature: all life is in time. But as a dimension of human life time is not only the matrix of growth and decline between birth and death. It is also the condition of human sociality that is achieved again and again in the continuously incarnated contemporaneity of face-to-face interaction. (1991, 151)
If we are to take Luckmann's point seriously, as I do, then we must also recognize that when the reckoning of time changes, then human life in society also changes. Blumenberg's notion of an absolutism of reality provides an analytical structure for dealing with the centrality of time, especially in moments of change. It helps us recognize that it is crucial to separate the object of study from our analytical apparatus. In other words, we must be mindful that the temporal structures that give meaning to objects and relations, too, are historical. Moreover, as I will describe below, they came into particular use to address particular reasons, to reconcile this new temporality and the dislocation and anxiety it set off. By grounding thought in this basic condition that gives rise to a fear of one's lack of control over the social and natural environment, Blumenberg removes the hierarchy of science over myth, instead seeing both as two modes for "working up reality" (1985, 50-51). Thus myth is not exclusively past--nor is it implied that it should be--but, rather, is coexistent with science, though differentially valued. Moreover, if myth and logos function to allay fear in the unknown, our inquiry shifts to what one is familiar with, rather than pointing to sites where ignorance hindered the fulfillment guaranteed by knowledge (enlightenment).
The trope of discovery is important to the characterization of logos as the progressive separation from myth. As I hope was evident in my discussion of calendrical reform, the discovery of a past does not mean that knowledge of previous people, events, deeds, and so forth did not exist. Indeed, many of the discoveries I will discuss were well known prior to Meiji. For example, even though Edward Sylvester Morse has been credited with discovering shell mounds in Omori (between Yokohama and Tokyo), numerous people knew about these mounds, and collections of paraphernalia from them existed in the Tokugawa era, if not earlier (Bleed 1986).