French-speaking intellectuals of modern and contemporary Japan : Nakae Chômin (1847-1901) and Katô Shûichi (1919-2008)

From the 1920s onwards, Marxism provided a solid analytical framework for the critical examination of Japan's modernization, while from the late 1960s onwards, the culturalist discourse of nihonjinron (treatises on Japaneseness) reasserted the cultural specificity of Japanese society. From the 1980s onwards, this was followed by postmodernist discourse on the end of the "grand narrative", and then by post-colonialist discourse deconstructing the nation-state. Given the demonization of the state and the critique of the tyranny of the national, it is very difficult today to reconstruct an open national identity in the age of globalization. For my part, I would gladly subscribe to the "patriotism" advocated by Katô Shûichi, a critical left-wing patriotism that has nothing to do with chauvinistic nationalism. It's a position close to the "constitutional patriotism" of Jürgen Habermas, for whom modernity is an "unfinished project" that should never be abandoned along the way.

In my second lecture, I chose two figures to illustrate the situation of French-speaking intellectuals in modern and contemporary Japan: Nakae Chômin (1847-1901), nicknamed the "Rousseau of the East" for the Meiji era, and Katô Shûichi, for post-war Japan. Why these two authors among many others?

Nakae Chômin and Katô Shûichi both studied in France in their youth. Nakae arrived in France in 1872, four years after the Meiji Restoration and at the start of the Third Republic. He studied the history of the French Revolution and discovered the political thought of Rousseau. On his return to Japan in 1874, he opened a school of French studies in Tokyo. He translated Rousseau and became one of the most acerbic pens of the freedom and people's rights movement of the 1880s. As for Katô, he left to study medicine in Paris in 1951, six years after Japan's defeat and before the end of the American occupation. Already a great connoisseur of French literature, he sharpened his critical mind by familiarizing himself with the writings of Sartre, among others. On his return to Japan in 1955, he published a now-famous article on "the hybrid character of Japanese culture", criticizing both cultural nationalism, which relies on the myth of the timeless originality of Japanese culture, and modernist Westernism, which rejects all age-old tradition.

Both are among the few Japanese authors in the humanities whose major titles are available in French, yet Japanese thought is not yet sufficiently translated and known in France. And yet, translating thinkers from one language to another and vice versa is a necessary condition for constructive dialogue on an equal footing.

On the other hand, although imbued with French and Western culture, they have shown great respect for the heritage of Chinese thought. The proof is that Nakae chose classical Chinese for his translation of Rousseau's Social Contract , published in 1882. Unlike Fukuzawa Yukichi, the cantor of 文明開化 civilization and the supposed author of 脱亜論 Plaidoyer pour la sortie de l'Asie (1885), Nakae did not reject the tradition of Confucian studies. Aware of the Eurocentric and imperialist character of civilization, he gave his translation of Rousseau's Discourse on the Sciences and Arts the very apt title of 非開化論 L'a-civilisation ou Contre la civilisation.

Finally, they were both tireless advocates of pacifism and democracy. Modern Japan has had two constitutions: the Meiji Constitution of 1889, granted by the emperor, and the 1946 Constitution, the draft of which was drawn up under the direction of the American occupation army and adopted by the Japanese Diet. Nakae Chômin was deeply disappointed by the 1889 Constitution, which, although promulgated a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, was an imperial charter inspired by the Bismarckian model rather than a constitution in the sense of Article 16 of the Declaration of 1789. He tried to transform the "rights granted" from above into "rights restored" through the struggle of the people, but to no avail. The 1946 Constitution marked a break with the past, founded on the principles of the sovereignty of the people, fundamental human rights and the renunciation of the right to war. Japan was thus transformed from a constitutional monarchy into a parliamentary democracy. Not only is the emperor's new status as "the symbol of national unity" (article¹) not incompatible with Nakae's Rousseauist conception of the Republic, but also, and above all, article 9 corresponds almost to the letter of the absolute pacifism that Nakae had one of the three protagonists of the Political Dialogues expound.

We must acknowledge the obvious contradiction between article 9 and the existence of "self-defense forces". The fact remains that Article 9 has prevented Japan from engaging in armed conflict, while the revision of the Constitution has long been an ambition of the conservative PLD party. In 2004, Katô Shûichi took the initiative of founding the "Article 9 Association" with eight other writers and intellectuals, including Oé Kenzaburo (1934- ), and devoted the last four years of his life to defending Article 9. This is the situation of Japanese intellectuals with a French humanist background, despite the fact that the 1994 Nobel Prize winner for literature delivered his Stockholm speech, "Moi, d'un Japon ambigu" (1995; tr. fr., 2001), in English.