The Modern Chinese Language and its Changing Status in the Japanese University
Paul Sinclair
Ph.D Candidate
Osaka University of Foreign Studies
August 27, 2004
paulus27jp@yahoo.co.jp
In March 1997, the Asahi Shimbun Weekly AERA ran an article called “ Niwaka bumu ka: Chugoku netsu ga hirogaru” [A False Boom? The Spread of Chinese Fever]. A large photo showed students hunched over desks studying Chinese, and the article went on to discuss a sudden increase in Japanese university students taking Chinese as a second Second Language [1], or foreign language apart from English or the language of their major. The demand for Chinese had outstripped that for either German or French, and had taken the big research-based universities off-guard. AERA describes how Waseda University and its cohort were forced to hastily set up Chinese courses, hire teachers, and struggle with swelling student numbers. And more importantly, universities were beginning to grapple with demands by companies for talented young people who both understood modern China and could speak the language. AERA interviewed several university students about their reasons for studying Chinese. “Chinese would appear good on my resume,” “The Chinese economy is rapidly developing,” “I want to do Sino-Japanese history,” and “I want to be a lawyer and handle cases involving Chinese people,” were all answers. AERA raised the intriguing possibility that all this could be a false boom.
No one wonders any longer whether the Chinese language boom is going to end soon, and universities have temporarily found classrooms and teachers for their Chinese as a second Second Language classes, though there is likely still little consensus on how to educate “China experts” for the business world. What is interesting from today’s perspective is that AERA has seemingly glossed over the really momentous development of the mid-1990’s. For the first time since the inception of the Imperial University in 1877, modern Chinese language was finally being taken on equal terms with English, German and French. The AERA article could have also mentioned the peculiar fact that not only were there not enough classrooms and teachers of Chinese, there was no real department in which one could major in modern Chinese in the big research-based universities ( sôgô daigaku ) had one even wished. Was this flood of university students taking Chinese in the mid-1990’s, then, the first sign of interest in modern Chinese language in the Japanese university? Why had Chinese language been so thoroughly cut off from mainstream research? Was this part of a wider tendency in Japan’s modern period to venerate the Chinese classics, and look down on China’s modern spoken language?
This paper will argue that the odd situation in the 1990’s wherein Chinese had for the first time been recognized as a real second language in the university system was not a result of Japanese indifference to the modern China and its language. Rather, it was the result of struggle between two opposing value systems, one steeped in Western science and culture, and the other steeped in centuries of Chinese educational tradition. This paper explores two specific historical junctures in which the study of the modern Chinese language had begun to flourish in mainstream academic culture, but was ultimately overwhelmed by the Western orientation of the Japanese academy. We go on to argue that far from ignoring modern Chinese language, there have always been Japanese scholars who dedicated their careers to establishing the education and research of modern Chinese language in Japanese academia.
1. “Modern Chinese Language Education”: A Tentative Definition
“Chinese language education” is worth carefully defining, as the “Chinese language” in Japan has always been a blurry category at best. Historically speaking, the spoken Chinese language was not one thing. It was called “Tôwa” (Tanghua in Chinese) in the Edo period, and from the Meiji period, it was alternately referred to as Kango, Chûgokugo, Shingo, and Shinago in Japanese, and as Jingyu (essentially the language of Beijing), Huayu, and Zhongguohua in Chinese. And these various names often referred to all of the Chinese dialects as a collective whole rather than to the standard Beijing pronunciation as has been the Western custom since the mid-nineteenth century.
Furthermore, the study of the Chinese classics (kanbun) in the Faculty of Letters of the Japanese universities (bungakubu) was carefully distinguished from the study of modern Chinese language. The esoteric study of the classics, Kangaku, did not even treat the classics as if it really had anything in common with the modern Chinese language. Kangaku used the the Japanese pronunciation and Japanese word order (kundoku) which essentially rendered the text in Japanese, especially if one considers the fact that the text may have been written by a Japanese person in the first place. Baron D. Kikuchi (1909), one-time president of the University of Tokyo, notes, “the Chinese that we study is not a modern language any more than the Greek of English is a modern language; with us the Chinese is the old classical Chinese, different from the modern Chinese, but to be understood when written down, by an educated Chinese” (1909,25).
To complicate things, there have been times when this distinction between modern and classical Chinese has become blurred. For example, Ando Hikotaro (1988) recounts how that in the late 1930’s when several million Japanese soldiers and civilians lived in China, the soldier Chinese language (heitai shinago) took on a life of its own where Japanese would use the kanbun word order, vocabulary, or pronunciation to speak to the local Chinese (114). And in 1938, the Japanese government pressed for kanbun teachers in middle schools to begin teaching jibun or the official written language of modern China, assuming that the two were the same (108).
“Chinese language education” in this paper simply refers to Chinese language taught in the modern pronunciation. While it generally refers to the modern spoken and written form of the Chinese language, Chinese language education sometimes included the classics. Just as in the Western “Orientalist” tradition, some Japanese educators of Chinese language used the modern Chinese spoken language as a tool to investigate classical Chinese, and others resisted an arbitrary distinction between classical Chinese and the modern dialects.
2. 1885: Modern Chinese Language Education’s First Big Failure
Chinese language education first became important to Japan as a nation in 1870 when the newly established Japan state entered into preliminary discussions with the Qing government about normalizing relations. Translators were urgently needed to conduct formal communications with the Zongli Yamen, or the Office of Foreign Affairs set up in Beijing by the Chinese to deal with foreigners. As a result, in 1871, the Gaimushô (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) in Tokyo set up the Kango Gakujo for the education of Chinese translators.
The subsequent history of Chinese language education in the early Meiji education system is a bewildering one. At a time when the Imperial University had not yet developed as a center of gravity, schools opened only to be closed months later or to be amalgamated with other schools for political rather than logistical reasons. Language education was particularly unstable because it was not yet clear the precise role language studies would play in the development of the modern Japanese state, and it became obvious not all languages needed to be employed to the same purposes. In fact, not all languages even had the same value. This section will discuss how that despite auspicious beginnings in a government-backed institution devoted entirely to the Chinese language, Chinese language education in Japan suffered a series of reversals and then a catastrophe that finally forced it outside of the mainstream academic system in 1885.
The first setback came when the Western-oriented Monbushô (Ministry of Education) assumed control of foreign language education from the Gaimushô in 1873. Around the time the Kango Gakujo was set up for studying Chinese, the Gaimushô had also set up a counterpart for the education of Western languages, the Yôgakujo, which taught English, French, and German, and later Russian. Anxious to make the system more efficient, the Monbushô combined the two institutions in the Gaikokugogakujo (Foreign Language School), drawing up a formal curriculum (Rokkaku, 1998, 63). As a result, the course was broken into two sections, one for translators and one for “continuing” students, or students that would go on to higher education and ultimately play an important role in the fledgling Meiji state. Chinese, Russian, and Korean began to be pushed toward the translation track, while the prestigious European languages were beginning to be seen as preparatory languages for university education.
The second blow to Chinese education came when the Monbushô further consolidated Meiji language education later in 1873, setting up the Tokyo Foreign Language School, an early precursor to what is now the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The composition of this school was significant, as it amalgamated the abovementioned Gaikokugogakujo with two other institutions that had grown out of a much different tradition. English, German, and French language students arrived from the Kaisei Gakkô, which dated back to the Banshoshirabesho set up in 1856 (subsequently renamed the Yôshoshirabesho, and then Kaiseijo in the 1862) (MESC, 16). The Kaisei Gakkô students carried considerable weight not only because their school traced its roots back to the first official institution studying the West, but also because the Kaisei Gakkô had employed foreign teachers around the Restoration, and the school was destined to become part of Tokyo University. The other institution thrown into the mix, the Daiichi Daigakuku Doitsugaku Kyôjô [The First University Precinct German Language School], also had a prestigious Western orientation as the Meiji government had hired its German teacher, R. Holz, through the Prussian Government (Rokkaku, 1988, 68).
The Tokyo Foreign Language School further refined the two language education tracks in the Gaikokugogakujo into what was called the Senmon Gakkô [Specialized Course] and the Gaikokugo Gakkô [Foreign Language Course]. The Senmon Gakkô curriculum was taught by foreign teachers, and all of its students were shingaku kibôsha, or students who would go on to higher education. The Gaikokugo Gakkô, on the other hand, was only for those who wished to later enter the Senmon Gakkô curriculum and for future translators. In reality, the Gaikokugo Gakkô track was designed to give practical language skills for translators and interpreters. The school boasted six languages, English, French, German, Russian, Chinese, and Korean, which had been added in 1880. English, French, German belonged to the Senmon Gakkô curriculum while Chinese, Russian, and Korean students were restricted to the Gaikokugo Gakkô track which, of course blocked their students advancement to higher education.
The final blow to Chinese language came in 1884 when “business studies” finally got mixed up with language education, a phenomenon that was to last another century. A new business college called the Kôtô Shôgyô Gakkô [Higher Business College] was set up as an affiliate of the Tokyo Foreign Language School. No longer able to control the conflicting mandates, the Monbushô amalgamated the above two schools in the following year with a third business school called Kôtô Shôgyô Gakkô [Tokyo Business School], spelling the end of the Meiji “international language school.” The French and German language students and teachers moved over to the Tôkyô Daigaku Yobimon, or Tokyo University Preparatory College [2] , where they joined the school’s English department, which had been moved to higher ground some years before.
An uproar ensued. The Chinese, Korean, and Russian students suddenly found themselves thrown in with sons of merchants who had been studying business when they themselves had until then been part of the elite track of Meiji foreign language students. But more importantly, the serious Chinese language students like Miyajima Daihachi (1867-1943), quit the school in a fury, realizing that they had just heard the death knell for their field of study (Ando, 13).
2.1 Miyajima Daihachi and post-1885 Chinese Language Education
One of the students affected by the collapse of the Tokyo Foreign Language School went on to become one of the founders of modern Chinese language education in Japan. As an endnote to this section, we will briefly follow the trajectory of Miyajima Daihachi’s career, which both dispels any belief that the Japanese were not serious about the Chinese language, and illustrates how greatly the values of the Chinese students and the Meiji bureaucrats diverged. Miyajima’s father was a poet, a Chinese scholar, and an activist deeply involved in the Kôakai [Society for the Revival of Asia]. He later set up the Kôagakkô a school that taught both Chinese and Japanese as foreign languages. Miyajima inherited some of his father’s passion, and began studying Chinese classics with Chinese friends of his father when he was five [3]. When he was fifteen, he moved to his father’s Kôagakkô, and then to the Tokyo Foreign Language School mentioned above. In 1888, he went to what is now Hebei province in the mainland and studied under a Chinese scholar in a traditional Chinese shuyuan. Miyajima wore Chinese clothes, studied calligraphy and the classics until the misfortune of his teacher’s death and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 forced him to return to Japan (Murayama, 183). On his return, he set up the Eikisha [Return Home Singing School] in his home, and then the Zenrin Shoin [Good Neighbor Academy] when student numbers became too great. He also published a Chinese textbook called the Kyûshuhen, a tiny manual for studying conversational Chinese that became the most popular Chinese textbook in Japan ever, going through 126 publications (Rokkaku, 1988, 19).
Miyajima’s scholarship never could have fit into the mainstream academy. He insisted on teaching the Chinese classics in their modern Chinese pronunciation when relations with the Chinese were increasingly antagonistic, and Japan was distancing itself from the culture of modern China. At the same time, Miyajima’s antagonism toward the establishment was obvious: He agreed to teach kanbun in the Faculty of Letters at Tokyo Imperial University on a part-time basis, but refused to acknowledge his own rank as professor. He believed that one learned to speak Chinese by talking with Chinese people, and refused to analyze Chinese grammatically in the Western philological tradition that so deeply influenced research on the Western languages in the Imperial University (Ando, 21).
3. The Kyôyô Gakubu and Modern Chinese Language Education’s Second Collapse
This section moves on to another crucial period in the history of modern Chinese language studies in the Japanese university. From the 1930’s, Chinese language studies had boomed in response to Japanese commercial activities in China, just as Chinese language studies boomed in the 1990’s when the Chinese economy began to gain momentum. Everyday people were interested in learning Chinese conversation, and modern Chinese language education had found a tenuous footing in the Imperial University. It is to this story we now turn.
Japanese people generally view Kuraishi Takeshiro as the real father of modern Chinese language education in Japan as his students and his students’ students went on to become apostles for the Chinese language education in the post-WWII years. However, neither Kuraishi’s ground-breaking research nor his modern ideas about Chinese education were to survive into the 1950’s in Kyoto and Tokyo Universities where he had been active for so many years. This paper introduces Kuraishi’s research on modern Chinese language, his theories about teaching and learning modern Chinese, and then addresses the following question. What happened in 1947 that prevented the Chinese language curriculum of Japan’s leading expert on Chinese language from making further advance in the elite public universities?
Kuraishi Takeshiro had an impressive career. He graduated from the Chinese Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University in 1921, and after spending a short time in the graduate schools of both Kyoto and Tokyo Universities, took up a professorship at Otani University in 1924. He moved to the Faculty of Letters in Kyoto University, becoming Assistant Professor 1927. In the same year, he left for China where he would spend two years as a Monbushô Researcher (Zaigai Kenkyûin). In 1940, he took on a professorship at Tokyo University, which he held concurrently with his position at Kyoto University until 1949. In 1949 he moved permanently to Tokyo University where he remained until his retirement in 1958.
To today’s casual Western observer, Kuraishi’s approach to the modern Chinese language research was an exact fit for university humanities research as it developed in the last half of the 20th century. Rather than pursuing one single subject to great depth, Kuraishi joined forces with other scholars, studied under Chinese teachers, and helped open many fields for further study. He came across a book written about the Wu dialect by Chinese scholar Zhao Yuan Ren, which inspired him to first study the Wu language and then Hakka and the Fukien dialect (Kuraishi, 1975, 56). Kuraishi Takeshiro’s efforts were to inspire Hashimoto Mantaro’s ground-breaking work in the seventies about Chinese dialect (Hashimoto, 1999, v). At the beginning of the Showa period (1926), Japan’s pell-mell advance in the mainland had caused the quality of Chinese education to drop to the point where students were taught that the “dong” in the Chinese dongxi [thing] was pronounced like the “don” in the Japanese udon (Takakura, 1954, 751). Countering this anti-intellectual tendency, Kuraishi teamed up with Tokyo University physicist Obata Jûichi to mechanically analyse the Chinese tones (Kuraishi, 1975, 59). Kuraishi was also dissatisfied with the Wade-Giles system of spelling Chinese, and went to considerable lengths to spread first the Zhuyin Fuhao and then in the fifties pinyin, the two Chinese-created orthographies. Kuraishi Takeshiro also lamented in his student years that a dictionary still did not exist wherein Japanese could look up the pronunciation of a character without thumbing through the dictionary, and turned his attention to dictionaries after WWII, eventually publishing his highly-rated Iwanami Jisho in 1963. For a scholar active in the fifties, Kuraishi’s achievements were impressive indeed.
However, the most intriguing aspect of Kuraishi’s work was his approach to Chinese language education. In 1941 he published his now famous Shinago Kyouiku no Riron to Jissai [Chinese Language Education—Theory and Practice]. The book caused such an uproar that the publisher, Iwanami Shigeo, founder of Iwanami Shoten and a friend of Kuraishi, joked that he was happy [the controversy allowed him to be able sell so many books] (Kuraishi, 1975, 47) This book was revolutionary in two ways. First, Kuraishi proposed that universities should do away with the kundoku, or Japanese convention of reading the classics in the Japanese pronunciation, and in the Japanese word order. This was an experiment that had been tried by the likes of Tokugawan philosopher Ogyû Sorai (Kuraishi, 1941, 70), and by the abovementioned Miyajima Daihachi. Now the proposal was being raised again in the early forties by Japan’s main Chinese scholar. The second startling aspect of his new curriculum was that Kuraishi was proposing to treat kanbun, or Chinese written in the classical style, and the modern Beijing dialect as different parts of the same tree. To understand Chinese, he argued, one had to read the classics, and study the modern pronunciation.
One post-war anecdote illustrates Kuraishi’s strength of conviction about his new curriculum. In 1947 he was summoned to lecture in front of the emperor (shinkô), which happened the following year. Kuraishi recalls choosing a passage from Neo-Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi, and reading it in the modern Beijing pronunciation while the emperor sat quietly without comment. Kuraishi admits he had done something unprecedented, but since he had washed his hands of the kundoku, he was not willing to go back to it just for one occasion (Kuraishi, 1975, 84). The image of the Japanese emperor having Chinese classics read to him in the modern Peking dialect would have been a powerful one indeed.
3.1 The 1947 Education Reforms and Chinese Language Education
Through his efforts in the twenties and thirties, Kuraishi Takeshiro had managed to get Chinese established in the mainstream of the academic elite. This was partly accomplished through the prestige of the Literature Departments of the Imperial Universities in Kyoto and Tokyo in which he worked. However, he had also used his connections to get the Chinese language established in the First Higher Middle School and the Yamaguchi Higher Middle School, which were two of the elite Higher Middle Schools that allowed access to the Imperial University education. This was desirable because any of the languages taught at the Higher Middle Schools could then be used as subjects on the University Entrance Examination, which gave an early toehold in the larger university system. It is worth noting that Kuraishi Takeshiro attended the First Higher Middle School, and it was to this institution to which the prestigious Western Languages had fled when the Tokyo Foreign Language School closed in 1885.
The fatal blow to modern Chinese education came soon after WWII when the Education Reform Committee (Kyôiku Sasshin Iinkai) set up by the Allied General Headquarters (GHQ) revamped the entire education system. In 1946, the United States Education Mission to Japan, a panel of 26 American education experts surveyed the Japanese education system and recommended a 6-3-3-4 system of schooling which more resembled the American system, with six years of elementary school, three years of junior high and high school, and four years of university. Beneath the surface of these reforms, one sees a sincere desire on the part of the American educators to make the Japanese system more egalitarian. “In order to increase the opportunities for liberal education at higher levels,” the report concluded, “it would be desirable to liberalize to a considerable extent the curricula of the preparatory schools (Kôtô Gakkô) leading to the universities and those of the more specialized colleges (Senmon Gakkô), so that a general college training would be more widely available” (MESC, 235). The new 6-3-3-4 system was really taking aim at the elitist Upper Middle Schools where the prestigious European had lodged themselves, and Chinese had perched precariously thanks to Kuraishi’s efforts. Getting rid of the Higher Middle Schools cut away the key feeder schools on which the Imperial Universities depended.
This rethinking led to the creation of the Kyôyô Gakubu[Department of Liberal Studies], which was added along with Economics and Education departments to the traditional Imperial University departments of literature, law, medicine, engineering, science and agriculture. On the surface, this “General Education” or “Liberal Education” was designed to “provide general education and specialized knowledge in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom for future leaders of Japan” (Kyôto Daigaku Nanjûnenshi Iinkai, 163). In reality, it was an organization that dealt with two headaches. First, it was a way of getting rid of the elitist Upper Middle schools that stressed science and foreign language skills for a tiny minority of students bound for universities. These seven schools traced back to the early Meiji period, and by the end of WWII had developed a strong and independent character and an impressive academic tradition (MESC, 1980, 126). The Kyôyô Gakubu was a way of salvaging some of this tradition. In the case of Kyoto University, the Third Upper Middle School actually became home to the Kyôyô Gakubu of Kyoto University. Second, the Kyôyô Gakubu also took pressure off a system going through tumultuous change. American higher education had been transformed by the globalizing influence of WWII, and it was difficult for the conservative Japanese university system to readily accommodate all these new ideas and areas of study. It was logical then, for subjects like anthropology, social studies, and education that had not been part of the old imperial university system to collect in the Kyôyô Gakubu. It was to the Kyôyô Gakubu that modern Chinese education was moved, where it was to stay.
It would have been immediately obvious to Chinese educators at the time that modern Chinese education in the Imperial University had been dismantled. Ijichi Yoshitsugu, Kuraishi Takeshiro’s most famous student and later president of Osaka University of Foreign Studies cynically observed that modern Chinese was never really taken seriously in the Kyôyô Gakubu. He points out the language courses in the Kyôyô Gakubu had three mandates: 1) to provide broad learning, critical thinking, and analytical skills, 2) to provide reading skills for specialized research, and 3) to provide practical skills for use in the international arena. General learning, critical thinking, and analytical skills mentioned in 1) were the values of European people, Ijichi notes, and learning a European language was the only way one could get critical thinking and analytical skills. And with only a few hours a week devoted to language education, (2) and (3) were not even serious objectives (Ijichi, 1986, 130).
Classics, on the other hand, quietly returned to the Chinese department in the Faculty of Letters (bungakubu). The Chinese Literature department returned to the role that it had always filled as center for all serious academic study of China, which included not only literature, but also philosophy and history. With modern Chinese language out of the way in the Kyôyô Gakubu, and a good part of the faculty not specifically interested in language, there was no longer any necessity to pretend to read them in the modern pronunciation. The Kuraishi experiment melted into the past and researchers returned to the kundoku which had held them in good stead for centuries. The modern Chinese language had once again been completely separated from the Chinese classics in the Japanese academy.
4. Conclusion
The Japanese university students’ sudden interest in the 1990’s in studying Chinese language has yet to be put in a historical perspective. This paper has followed some of the mini-revolutions that have occurred in educational institutions since the Meiji Restoration that have affected the development of modern Chinese language education. It is clearly a history where modern Chinese language has been struggling to find itself in a Western oriented academy, while being faced with some bitter failures. Why can be made of these failures?
Part of the problem was geographic. In the Edo period, interaction with foreigners had been conducted in Nagasaki, and other parts of Kyûshû which figuratively faced China. However, it was Edo Bay, not Nagasaki harbor into which Perry sailed in 1853, and in the Meiji period Japan’s main window to the outside world became Tokyo rather than Nagasaki. While Nagasaki looked across the Japan Sea at Asia, Tokyo had its eyes fixed on the West. Chinese language studies would feel the repercussions of this change for more than a century. From this broad geographical perspective, the modern Chinese language education experiments described above failed in the Japanese university precisely because they had a history in a vanished world.
The careers of Miyajima Daihachi and Kuraishi Takeshiro may also provide some answers. Both were articulate and brilliant proponents of a revolution, and both ultimately out of step with the times. It is interesting to consider what exactly was unpalatable about their messages to Meiji and post-WWII Japan. Both spent long periods in China outside Japanese academic circles, communicating with Chinese people. Both pursued their passions even though they were resisting the spread of the prestige English language culture. Both insisted that modern Chinese could not be viewed in isolation of the classical written record. However, perhaps the real issue was more basic. Both Miyajima and Kuraishi insisted on teaching the classics in the modern Chinese pronunciation when the Japanese had been studying the classics in the Japanese pronunciation for more than one thousand years. In the end, they had raised questions to which there are no answers. What is the Chinese language? What does the Japanese student of Chinese need to know? These are questions just beginning to be asked again.
Footnotes
[1] “Second second language” (daini gaikokugo) was an odd appellation that meant Chinese was taken as an elective other than English, or other than the language of the student’s specialization.
[2] This school later became the First Higher Middle School, about which we will hear more later.
[3] In the Chinese tradition, students began learning Chinese language by pronouncing the characters in the Chinese classics without attempting to understand their meaning.
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“Second second language” (daini gaikokugo) was an odd appellation that meant Chinese was taken as an elective other than English, or other than the language of the student’s specialization.
This school later became the First Higher Middle School, about which we will hear more later.
In the Chinese tradition, students began learning Chinese language by pronouncing the characters in the Chinese classics without attempting to understand their meaning.