-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Douglas Howland, Lisa Yoshikawa. Making History Matter: Kuroita Katsumi and the Construction of Imperial Japan., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 208–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.208
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Kuroita Katsumi (1874–1946) became a leader of the “second generation” of Tokyo Imperial University historians who came of age during the 1890s and dominated the historical profession through the rise of imperialism, militarism, and the war (4, 5). Kuroita may not be immediately familiar to students of Japanese history and culture, but many have consulted one or another volume of Kuroita’s massive primary source collection, Kokushi taikei: Nihon kiryaku zenpen (1929–1936), or the massive edition of academic essays Iwanami kōza Nihon rekishi (1933–1935). They are standard resources.
Yoshikawa argues—contrary to both the “second generation’s” postwar institutional heirs and Marxists—that these “second generation” historians were neither an insignificant group to those outside of academia nor “academically inconsequential government lackeys” (8). Rather, they were independent, proactive, “devoted to the examination of the past,” and “in tune with the imperial state’s visions” (8). Under Kuroita’s leadership, historical scholarship in Japan “evolved” under the conditions of a new alliance between historians and the state (18). Yoshikawa thus discerns “the patterns” in Kuroita’s work, “how his various enterprises made sense as a whole,” and how they evolved “with political shrewdness” between the 1890s and 1930s (18). The author celebrates Kuroita’s life as “represent[ing] the intersection between modern nation building and scholarship” (262). This is an underwhelming thesis, particularly because, thematically and chronologically, the book follows the more sophisticated and insightful work of Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993), and of Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan (1998). By comparison, this book reads as if it is an effort to rehabilitate Kuroita, for example, for his assemblage of a Japanese manuscript collection on behalf of the Yale Association of Japan in 1934, now held at Yale University (223–225).
