Young migrants have been the major migrant labor force in urban China. But they may be more vulnerable in quality of life and mental health than other groups, due to their personal characteristic and some social/community policies or management measures. It highlights the need to focus on psychological wellbeing and probe driving and reinforcing factors that influence their mental health. This study aimed to investigate the influence of subjective/objective status and possible pathways of young migrants’ life satisfaction and psychological distress. (...) Data on 9838 young migrants in the China Migrants Dynamic Survey were analyzed by LISREL 8.8. A total of 94.03% migrated for jobs or business. Subjective status, including subjective socioeconomic status, social adaptation, and psychological integration, had positive effects on life satisfaction, whereas social adaptation and psychological integration negatively affected psychological distress. Objective status, including objective socioeconomic status and health insurance, had adverse effects on life satisfaction, whereas they positively affected psychological distress. Social participation and city belonging had only significant positive mediating roles on life satisfaction. It is essential to increase social adaptation and decrease integration stress according to younger internal migrants’ practical needs. It is also necessary to enhance community/social resources and activities in the context of developing sustainability in the community to assist in mental health promotion. (shrink)

Histories of Japanese science have been integral in affirming the Meiji Restoration of 1868 as the starting point of modern Japan. Vernacular genres, characterized as “premodern,” have therefore largely been overlooked by historians of science, regardless of when they were published. Paradoxically, this has resulted in the marginalization of the very works through which most people encountered science. This article addresses this oversight and its historiographical ramifications by focusing on kyūri books – popular works of science – published in (...) the years following the Restoration, when there was unprecedented public interest in science. It asks, what if we take these kyūri books on their own terms as science books, just as those of the time saw them? This article explores three genres of kyūri books, namely fictionalized formats, such as the epic tale ( monogatari); epistolary guides; and genres, such as the sutra, that drew on religious textual practices. It argues that these literary genres provided interpretive frameworks that shaped readers’ encounters with “modern” science. This exploration underscores the importance of engaging with vernacular genres to understand the emergence of science as a global category in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

『昭和前期の科学思想史』、『昭和後期の科学思想史』に続き、明治以降の我が国の科学思想史を通覧するシリーズ三部作最終巻。.

Originally published as 「明治の哲学界：有機体の哲学とその系譜」in 井上克人編『豊饒なる明治』, Kansai Daigaku Shuppannbu, 2012, 3–22. Translated by Morisato Takeshi. German Idealism was introduced to Japanese intellectuals in the middle of Meiji era and was mainly received from a mystical or religious perspective, as we see in Inoue Tetsujirō’s “harmonious existence,” Inoue Enryō’s “unity of mind and body,” and Kiyozawa Manshi’s “existentialism.” Since these theories envisioned true reality as a unified and living whole, I group them under the label “philosophy of organism” and from there (...) argue that their conviction that “all is truth and truth is all” was shaped in large part by the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana. The understanding of Buddhist concepts by Meiji philosophers was philosophical in its content, and those who devoted themselves to the study of Western philosophy were encouraged to describe Eastern thought in Western philosophical terms. As a result, the philosophical world of the Meiji era developed an original standpoint that unified Eastern and Western perspectives by means of a logic of “phenomena-in-reality.”. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate a reprint of a Meiji anthology titled Meiren qiantai shi 美人千態詩 by Shang- hai shuju in 1914. This is the first time that this anthology has received critical attention. I examine the poems collected by the anthologist, contextualize the anthology in relation to traditions and trends in Japan and China, and analyze the significance of the poetic tradition centered on images of women for understanding border-crossing literati culture from the seventeenth to the early twentieth (...) centuries. My study revises both Japanese and Chinese literary history. I show that the practice of kanshi composition was sustained by major Japanese men of letters through the late Meiji era. With the rise of modern Japanese literature, especially in the genre of fiction, it is generally held that there was a rupture between Edo and Meiji-Taisho literature. Within the discursive space carved out by the beauty anthology, however, we see a continuity that unified the Edo and Meiji eras. Furthermore, the Japanese poets’ particular engagement with the subgenre on beautiful women and related sentiments was concurrent with developments among the Chinese literati from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. (shrink)

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. By Seth Jacobowitz. Harvard East Asian Monographs, vol. 387. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 299. $39.95.

This paper examines the perspective of Shintoistic Christianity of Ebina Danjo, a Japanese theologian, during the Meiji period, and how his view influences Japanese churches today. Based on the review of literature, this paper investigates the historical background of Christianity in Japan during that period, followed by key issues of Ebina's thoughts on Christianity with respect to his Bible interpretation, nationalism, and view of the Logos. Through the analysis of his perspective of Shintoistic Christianity, this paper presents some missiological (...) implications. (shrink)

「国制知」とは、国家の成り立ちと諸制度―国制を構想し、その支柱となってそれを運営していく知的営み、ないしそれに携わる学識集団である。本書は、明治日本の「国制知」をドイツ国家学に求め、ローレンツ・フォン ・シュタイン、伊藤博文、渡辺洪基の思想と活動を追いながら、ドイツ国家学の成立と展開、わが国への伝播とその帰趨を見届け、その「国制知」としての実態と機能に比較法史の視角からアプローチする。.

Radical “Westernizing” transformations in extra-European countries, from Peter I’s Russia to Meiji Japan, are traditionally presented as a response to pressures from the more militarily and technologically advanced European powers. This corresponds to the general tendency to view war as the driving force behind early modern state-building. However, the question remains: how exactly did such transformations happen, and what explains their timing? Why did some countries, such as Russia, embark on radical institutional restructuring that threatened large sections of the (...) traditional military classes in the absence of any obvious existential threat, while in others even clear and immediate dangers failed to ignite a full-scale “Westernization”? This article seeks to complicate the “bellicist” narrative of “Westernizing” transformations and to generalize about the role of elite conflict in propelling “self-strengthening” reforms. It argues that “Westernizations” in extra-European polities were enabled by breakdown of domestic political balance and driven by “challengers” emerging in the course of these conflicts, as they strove to maximize their power. Factional struggles accompanying “Westernizations” are interpreted here not as a conservative reaction against reforms, but as a process that preceded and enabled institutional restructuring. (shrink)

Nation-building initiatives during Japan's Meiji period (1868?1912) erected a rigid normalcy that galvanized a culture of exclusionism. They afforded broader spheres of social activity but a narrower range of acceptable behaviors, greater opportunities for individual empowerment but less tolerance for individuality itself. Backward-looking artists and writers were particularly susceptible to these developments, many earning repute as ?useless losers,? heretics, or traitors. This article speaks to the dynamics between modernity and marginalization through an analysis of the exclusionism that accompanied Japan's (...) modernization initiatives in the late nineteenth century. It demonstrates how Meiji's modernization program fostered the development of new paradigms of knowledge while condemning non-conformists as social misfits. The article begins with a review of early Meiji's construction of normalcy and then proceeds with a discussion of talented writers and artists rendered irrelevant by this process, ultimately exploring how conceptions of marginality played out in the social, political, and cultural contexts of that period. (shrink)

SummaryThe importation of Spencerism and Social Darwinism into Japan in the early Meiji era (from 1868 to the early 1880s) occurred against a background of rapid economic and industrial change which provoked widespread political unrest. This accelerated modernization was forced by Western demands for trade liberalization and the threat of Western imperialism. In this context, selected elements of Western scientific naturalism and liberalism could provide a prestigious ratification of élite agendas for the management of change, provided they could be (...) made culturally recognizable. It is suggested that traditional and Western knowledge claims were combined by key Meiji intellectuals in such a way that the product, Meiji Social Darwinism, supplied both the prestige of Western scientific positivism and the familiarity conferred by traditional resources. The clear differentiation between the constituents which made up Meiji Social Darwinism enables us to identify the distinct cultural functions performed by each of these sets of resources. In this study, these cultural functions emerge as elements in an élite class strategy. (shrink)

This chapter traces the evolution of Japan's systems of household and land registration from c.1600 to the period of early Meiji reforms in the 1870s and 1880s, with due attention to the distinction between a system designed by the state and local forms of registration practice. In the section on the pre-Meiji period, one such local practice of having people ‘disowned’ and its consequence — registerlessness — is examined. The section on the Meiji reforms and the section (...) that follows turn to the issue of continuity and discontinuity, and the question of whether any progress was made by those reforms. In order to illustrate the actual changes that took place at the local level, the chapter begins with an eighteenth-century story about a peasant woman and ends with a case of a family dispute that another village woman brought before the court some 120 years later. (shrink)

Introduction: Ethics and the universal in Meiji Japan -- Civilization and foolishness : contextualizing ethics in early Meiji Japan -- The epistemology of Rinrigaku -- Rinrigaku and religion : the formation and fluidity of moral subjectivity -- Resisting civilizational hierarchies : the ethics of spirit and the spirit of the people -- Approaching the moral ideal : national morality, the state, and dangerous thought -- Epilogue: The ethics of humanism and moral particularism in twentieth-century Japan.

This innovative study of ethics in Meiji Japan (1868–1912) explores the intense struggle to define a common morality for the emerging nation-state. In the Social Darwinist atmosphere of the time, the Japanese state sought to quell uprisings and overcome social disruptions so as to produce national unity and defend its sovereignty against Western encroachment. Morality became a crucial means to attain these aims. Moral prescriptions for re-ordering the population came from all segments of society, including Buddhist, Christian, and Confucian (...) apologists; literary figures and artists; advocates of natural rights; anarchists; and women defending nontraditional gender roles. Each envisioned a unity grounded in its own moral perspective. It was in this tumultuous atmosphere that the academic discipline of ethics (rinrigaku) emerged—not as a value-neutral, objective form of inquiry as its practitioners claimed, but a state-sponsored program with its own agenda. After examining the broad moral space of "civilization," Richard Reitan turns to the dominant moral theories of early Meiji and the underlying epistemology that shaped and authorized them. He considers the fluidity of moral subjectivity (the constantly shifting nature of norms to which we are subject and how we apprehend, resist, or practice them) by juxtaposing rinrigaku texts with moral writings by religious apologists. By the beginning of the 1890s, moral philosophers in Japan were moving away from the empiricism and utilitarianism of the prior decade and beginning to place "spirit" at the center of ethical inquiry. This shift is explored through the works of two thinkers, Inoue Tetsujiro (1856–1944) and Nakashima Rikizo (1858–1918), the first chair of ethics at Tokyo Imperial University. Finally, Reitan takes a detailed look at the national morality movement (kokumin dotoku) and its close association with the state before concluding with an outline of some conceptual linkages between the Meiji and later periods. With its highly original thesis, clear and sound methodology, and fluid prose, Making a Moral Society will be welcomed by scholars and students of both Japanese intellectual history and ethics in general. (shrink)

Conceptions of Geist (mind/spirit) associated with German Romanticism shaped ideologies of national folk, not only in Europe but elsewhere in the world. In Meiji Japan (1868hidden essencespirit” in Meiji Japan and to a critique of present-day exclusionary ideologies of Japanese spirit and identity.

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Engineer was only one of many British and American publications that took an avid interest in the rapid rise of Japan to the status of a fully industrialized imperial power on a par with major European nations. In December 1897 this journal published a photographic montage of "Pioneers of Modem Engineering Education in Japan" (Figure I), showing a selection of the Japanese and Western teachers who had worked to bring (...) about this singular transformation.' The predominance of Japanese figures in this representation is highly significant: it is an acknowledgment by British observers that the industrialization of Japan-the "Britain of the East"-was not a feat accomplished solely by Western experts who transferred their science and technology to passive Japanese recipients. Yet in focusing primarily on native teachers active in Japan after 1880, this image excludes several of the very foreigners who had trained this indigenous workforce in the preceding decade. Rather than attempting to assess the careers of each of the many international experts involved in Western encounters with Japan before and after the Meiji restoration in 1868, we will focus on disaggregating the highly individualized responses of just some of the Englishspeaking characters. In documenting their diverse encounters with Japanese people and technologies, we will look at the complex phenomena of cultural exchange in which they participated, not always without chauvinism or resistance. (shrink)