JAPAN AND THE SPECTER OF IMPERIALISM has argued that Japanese responses
to the Ansei treaty regime were characterized by vitalist ontologies of the
nation and a consistent concern with the mutual implication of discourses
of the foreign and the domestic. Such conceptions of national “life” con-
sistently functioned as alternative understandings of a capitalist “second
nature” that served to safely domesticate the market for Japanese pur-
poses. The book establishes that late nineteenth-century Japan suffered
under competing sovereignties that inflected various attempts to establish
a proper place for Japan within a liberal capitalist world characterized
by colonial hierarchy and evolutionary notions of zero-sum competition
and survival. It demonstrates that competing Japanese modes of govern-
mentality were haunted by the breakdown of their vitalist assumptions,
particularly by the unintended consequences of the Ansei treaties and the
hierarchies of coercion and exploitation that accompanied the capitalism
they brought with them.
Aside from the anarchism of Kôtoku Shûsui, all competing conceptions
of nineteenth-century Japanese national identity discussed in this book
sought to come to terms with the demands of the global market on the
Japanese social body. Most of these conceptions were efforts to constitute
a Japanese domestic sphere, in the sense of both the nation and the family.
Threats to Japanese national identity were frequently interpreted in familial
terms and the family was consistently defined as a locus for the production
and improvement of national citizens. Imperialism was just one of several
specters haunting Japanese ontologies of the nation and the individual.
Contrary to much previous work on Japan, this study establishes that
an organismic paradigm of the social body was as central for Japanese
intellectuals drawing on British liberalism as it was for those who devel-
oped their positions in dialogue with German idealism. While incorpo-
rating insights from previous postcolonial approaches to Japan-related
material and insisting on the level of economic and military coercion asso-
ciated with the spread of capitalism into East Asia, this book has sought to
account for the economic agency and hegemony of non-Western forces as
well. It takes as its point of deparature that the international legal regime
of the late nineteenth century and the associated cultural discourses of
civilization were instrumental in denying legal and economic agency to
Japan during the unequal treaty period and explores the manner in which
Japan in turn exploited these same institutions in its annexation and colo-
nial administration of Korea.

Chapter 1 situates the Ansei treaties as instituting a regime of differen-
tiated sovereignty. The treaty powers invoked a dynamic of cultural dif-
ference to legitimize economic, legal, and political discrimination under
international law. In a manner similar to the disarticulation of citizenship
under twenty-first century status-of-forces agreements and special eco-
nomic development zones, under the Ansei treaties Japanese citizens were
deprived of their right to the criminal jurisdiction of the Japanese state
in the case of crimes committed by foreigners residing in the treaty ports.
Foreign workers also received special privileges and above-market salaries.
Thus, it seems we may interpret the Ansei treaty system as a translational
system designed to substitute the space of the global market for that of
Japanese state sovereignty. In this respect, the unequal treaties with Japan
appear to anticipate the economic development zones promoted by neo-
liberalism since the 1980s.
The chapter finds that the treaties effectively replaced a feudal rule
of status with a regime of coercive contracts. Treaty power claims that
introduction of the rule of international law served a liberating, civilizing
function, came to be seen by Japan’s most ardent and influential liberals
(Fukuzawa Yukichi and Tokutomi Sohô, for example) as obviously false.
Such great power abuse of international law came to be widely considered
illegitimate, at least when applied to Japan. The chapter endeavors to
read Madame Butterfly as a narrative set in the Ansei treaty context and
critical of inequities in the unequal treaty regime from a position in deep
sympathy with the Christian-inspired promotion of a paternalist domes-
tic sphere. It also suggests that the novella’s emphasis on the gravity of
love-marriage and divorce deeply resonated with contemporary Japanese
debates and state policies actively promoting the seriousness of marriage
as a significant concern related to treaty revision through its potential
reflection on Japan’s relative level of civilization. The chapter notes the
incorporation of melodramatic tactics into Imperial state ceremony and
factory law debates. It argues that Kôtoku Shûsui’s anarchism, by con-
trast, called into question the easy association of the Japanese domestic
sphere and the national economic interest by arguing that claims to a
common domestic sphere were false claims of community advanced on
behalf of very narrow financial and political interests.

Chapter 2 explores the manner in which Mori Arinori implemented
those aspects of Spencerian evolutionary theory he considered helpful in
instituting industrial era market rationality, labor discipline, and national
competiveness in Japan. It finds that the educational reforms of Mori
and his successors contributed toward institutionalizing competition and
related elements of calculative market rationality that came to be signfi-
cantly formative of Meiji Japanese society. According to the Spencerian
logic implicit in Mori’s ethics text, citizens should be valued in terms of
their contribution to the accumulation of capital, a mode of governmen-
tality strikingly reminiscent of the economization of citizenship under
neoliberal modes of governmentality as theorized by Aihwa Ong. Never-
theless, the chapter finds that Mori also adjusts Spencerian evolutionism
in a manner that accounts for Japanese challenges. His stated views and
policies as education minister directly challenged Spencer’s opposition of
the militant and industrial modes by insisting that both were necessary
for late nineteenth-century Japan.
Chapter 3 reveals the role of aesthetic discourse drawn from German
idealism in new conceptions of Japanese national identity developed dur-
ing the 1880s and 1890s. It shows how Japanese claims of traditional
national unity required the prosthetic supplement of aesthetic discourse,
cultural preservation, and the associated academic disciplines developed
in the West. Shiga Jûkô and Kuga Katsunan explicitly drew upon the
thought of Johann Fichte to articulate an alternative, non-Western Japa-
nese modernity tied to a uniquely moral and spiritual Japanese domestic
sphere. Shiga and Kuga’s positions interestingly imply that occupied
Germany of Fichte’s era was already a site of non-Western, alternative
modernity in some sense.
Chapter 4 maps the extension of aesthetic discourse into the theoriza-
tion of imperial domesticity. Inoue Tetsujirô and Kuga Katsunan articu-
lated alternative modes of Japanese governmentality. Inoue conjured an
organismic utilitarianism that claimed moral superiority over the West on
communal grounds. Kuga’s approach was also organismic, but challenged
Western reason, even as it identified with the logic of Japanese capital.
Both positions constituted claims for an alternative Japanese modernity
and both directly sought to challenge Eurocentrism.
Chapter 5 establishes that Ozaki Kôyô’s The Gold Demon is not only
haunted by the hierarchies of exploitation that characterized domes-
tic class stratification and international imperialism. It also stages the
increasing commodification of domestic social and personal relations in a
capitalist market economy, albeit in combination with a particularly male-
centered politics of gender. It finds that the novel ultimately aligns itself
with Miyake and Kuga’s articulation of a Japanese social body accord-
ing to which freedom and life are identified with organismic national
community, whereas foreign capital and state authority are seen as agents
of uncanny alien powers that sabotage the realization of both personal
autonomy and national sovereignty. Japanese capital, on the other hand,

“孤光自照”一语非常的佛教化。网上一搜，果然，

“张孝祥家族笃信佛教的传统。张孝祥与禅宗的重要宗派临济宗的高僧多有交往，并崇信高僧大慧宗杲的学说。而其家族对佛教有虔诚的信仰，张孝祥自小耳濡目染，深受其影响。 ”——《张孝祥的禅宗思想及禅学渊源 》

政壇“騎士”
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今晚的夜色允许想起你

http://limiao.net/3041#comment-51034
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In peat where the bodies are.
Well I’ve said too much already
Hyperfine structures and soft-made-damp;
Lifeless, legless, a cozy nest of maggots
And begging for that loamy bank
On golden light of morning.

Some quivering slime that forever stains all it touches
Asked if it could follow me around for a while.
But how could I say no to that?

Hoary goat
With patches of matted fur
Is back to stay a spell
At the foot of my bed
The shedding and the foul aroma
And biting visitors with its mouth of sores
Sticking his hooves in the dessert
Leering with dead eyes
Upsetting the atmosphere, his hideous
bleating
And rubbing his balls on the carpet.
(He was only gone one week.)

I’m so sorry I ate the crustaceans

so now which is the fly and which is the human

My only companions decay in the pit;
Those are the only companions I want
Because I am the False Holly - the dead ringers

yet i found thee at last
A flower in moonlight, she was there,
Was rippling down white ways of glamour
Quietly laid on wave & air

His wife, a plum tree denying his touch.
He could not bear the glow
of crimson blossoms against a blue sky

above a sea more blue than he thought was possible.
Buddha said to the monkey, if you can
traverse my palm in a single somersault

I will set you free.
He loved women so much
gave up his own son for adoption

because the boy was not a girl.
The monkey could cross whole continents
in the flicker of an eyelash. A waterfall concealed

the entrance of his kingdom
His wife helped him bring from China
a female fan of his poetry. Beneath shadows

of moonlit pines, he slipped into her bed.
His dream of ancient scholarship came true:
plum tree and nightingale, wife and concubine.

He was complete. Poems flooded. Parades
of beetles. Translucent dreams of hyacinths.
Storms that revived primeval armies

slicing the world with liquid swords.
Death, the ultimate flower
blazed scarlet in a black river.

The monkey found himself in a desert
with a solitary pink obelisk.
The plum tree read the mind

of the nightingale, told her to escape.
The poet loved the pensive bird more than his life.
The monkey shouted for Buddha, the desert

vanished. Buddha held a finger before the monkey.
The poet hacked his wife with an ax,
then hung himself from a pine tree.

– Yun Wang published on Issue #10 Sept. 2008 BloodLotus an online literary journal

观念与历史——马克斯•韦伯和《新教伦理与资本主义精神》
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On not being a cat
Were I a cat, my love, I’d leave each day
a single dying mouse upon your bed;
but, human, I must find another way,
and honour you by leaving verse instead.

Marriage

In seeking a wife,
with the cook he’d converse.
her pancakes weren’t stodgy.
No quite the reverse.
Another girl wrote him
a triolet, terse.
He wanted them both,
and he muttered a curse,
and prayed to his God
with a question perverse:
“Lord, should I get married
for batter, or verse?”
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The Demise of the Lamaist State, by Melvyn C. Goldstein

p21. Surveys showed that there were 97,528 monks in Central Tibet and Kham in 1694, and 319,270 monks in 1733. Assuming a population in these areas in 1733 of about 2.5 million, about 13 percent of the total population and about 26 percent of the males were monks. The magnitude of this c an be appreciated by comparing it with Thailand, another prominent Buddhist society, where only about 1-2 percent of the total number of males were monks. Tibetans believed that monks per se were superior to laymen and that the state should foster both religion and the spiritual development of the country by making monkhood available to the largest possible number. Monasticism in Tibet, therefore, was not he otherworldly domain of am inute elite but a mass phenomenon.
The Tibetan monastic system was also unusual in that the overwhelming majority of monks were placed in monasteries by their parents when they were between the ages of seven and ten, without particular regards to their personality or wishes, and because becoming a monk was a lifelong commitment, not a temporary undertaking. There were many reasons why parents might make a son a monk. …