the Anglo-Japanese

523 Pages·2012·6.61 MB·English

LOST IN TRANSLATION:
Non-Linear Literary, Cultural, Temporal, Political, and Cosmological Transformations –
the Anglo-Japanese Productions of Minakata Kumagusu
by

Frederick Alan Little

A Dissertation submitted to the
Graduate School-Newark
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Division of Global Affairs
written under the direction of
Associate Professor Eva Giloi
and approved by

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_________________________________
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Newark, New Jersey
May, 2012
©2011

Frederick Alan Little

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

LOST IN TRANSLATION:
Non-Linear Literary, Cultural, Temporal, Political, and Cosmological Transformations –
the Anglo-Japanese Productions of Minakata Kumagusu

by Frederick Alan Little

Dissertation Director:
Associate Professor Eva Giloi

Naturalist, translator, littérateur, and political activist, Minakata Kumagusu, in his many
endeavors, offers an intriguing series of parallelisms with patterns of non-linear
development and network relationships found in the field of study that was his primary
focus: botany, more specifically mycology. In contrast to models of cultural and political
development imported from the West during the Meiji Restoration and extended during
the Showa and Taisho eras, and the strong orientation toward centralized vertical
hierarchy that in Japanese culture and governance of that period, Minakata offers an
understanding in terms of dispersed non-linear networks. As botanist, folklorist, and
environmental activist, Minakata refused engagement with academic and governmental
institutions, conducting his life and work in the remote Kii Peninsuala. In doing so, he
engaged with a variety of significant horizontal networks: elite aristocratic
networks, demotic press networks, ascent pan-Asian political networks, domestic
folkloric and literary networks, and international intellectual networks. He argued
forcefully against the monocultural tendencies of that period, providing an example of the
ways in which understandings of ecological and physical cultures and the corollary
social, intellectual, and spiritual cultures arising from that base validate cultural and
political counter-narratives that might otherwise be seen as subversive and alien by
centralized institutions and those beholden to those institutions.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Though it has felt at many times like a very solitary pursuit, the truth remains that
without the kindness and support of many other people, I would not even have approached
completion. First and foremost, I must thank my parents, who made every effort to insure that I
grew up surrounded by books, trees, and high expectations. For the gesture of kindness to a small
boy that seeded my interest in Japan, my father’s colleague, Jun Okasaki. As my instructors in
Columbia’s Department of East Asian Languages and Culture later taught me, “On no shiso wa,
yama mo takai, umi mo fukui.” I hope that this in some ways repays his kindness and their efforts.
There are a host of Americans without whose prior study in traditional Japanese arts and
their commitment to sharing the fruits of that study, this project would not have been possible in
its present form; among them, Stanley Pranin, the late Terry Dobson, Mary Heiny, Christine
Jordan, Rev. Eko Noble, Ellis Amdur, Meik Skoss, Diane Skoss, and Tobin Threadgill. While all
errors of commission and omission are, of course, mine, each has made a signal contribution of
one kind or another, for which I am grateful.
Of course, I must thank my Committee Chair, Dr. Eva Giloi, and the readers, Dr. Maurie
Cohen, Dr. Yale Ferguson, and Richard Langhorne.
The consistent and firm support I have been given in this undertaking — and other
matters — by Dean Urs Gauchat of the NJIT College of Architecture & Design has been of
incalculable benefit, as has the grace and forbearance of my colleagues John Cays, Sasha
Corchado, and the late Elly Matzko. To Dr. Karen Franck: for her good humor and the provision
of a refuge in which a number of these chapters were completed, thank you. And lest I forget,
thanks to my colleague Michele Collins for years of light but certain insistence that I finish.
Most particularly, I must thank my wife, Annie Gerard and my son and daughter, Perri
and Cory Gerard-Little for the many assistances they gave me of which I am aware, as well as
countless others that they provided without pointing them out to me over these many years of
labor. Thank you all. (Composed on the auspicious morning of the Full Moon, 11-11-11)
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Table Titles — v

List of Illustrations — vi

General Introduction — 1

Biographical Introduction — 18

1: Literary Translation (Collaboration with F.V. Dickins: ) — 41

2: Cultural & Temporal Translation (Articles in NATURE and NOTES & QUERIES: “The
Constellations of the Far East,” “The Mandrake,” “The Tale of the Wandering Jew,”
“Whittington’s Cat,” & “Gerbert’s Escape”) — 82

3: Cosmological & Epistemological Translation (Encounter & Correspondence with Toki
Hōryū: Fushigi & Yariate) —113

4: Political Translation (Sun Yat-Sen and Pan-Asianism in London; The Anti-Shrine
Consolidation Movement and Practical Ecology in Tanabe) — 160

5: Conceptual Translation (Yanagita Kunio & Folklore Studies; Iwata Jun’ichi & Queer
Studies) — 187

Conclusions — 232

Bibliography — 242

Appendix I — Chronology of the Life of Minakata Kumagusu —267

Appendix II — Full Text of Hōjōki — 299

Appendix III — Full Text of Entries in NATURE — 319

Appendix IV — Full Text of Entries in NOTES & QUERIES (1899-1916) — 373

Appendix V — Select Japanese-English Glossary — 502

Appendix VI — Illustrations — 514

Curriculum Vitae — 516
iv
LIST OF TABLES

Table of Meetings Between Minakata & Sun Yat-sen — 167

Table of Events in the Life of Minakata Kumagusu — 267

v
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration 1 — Minakata Kumagusu, circa 1891 — 504
Illustration 2 — Minakata Kumagusu and Jiang Shengzong, circa 1892 — 505
Illustration 3— Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks — 506
Illustration 4 — Buddhist Monk’s Robe — 507
Illustration 5 — Frederick Victor Dickins — 507
Illustration 6 — The Wandering Jew, by Gustave Doré — 508
Illustration 7 — Monks in procession on Mount Kōya — 509
Illustration 8 — Senior ordinants in procession at Mount Kōya. — 509
Illustration 9 — Japanese delegation 1893 World Parliament of Religions — 510
Illustration 10 — Minakata’s 1893 Diagram of mono, kokoro, and koto. —511
Illustration 11 —Tsurumi: relationships between cause and effect — 512
Illustration 12 —Minakata Mandala — 513
Illustration 13 — Kongokai Mandala — 514
Illustration 14 — Taizokai Mandala — 515
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1
INTRODUCTION: The Question of Minakata Kumagusu

The life of Minakata Kumagusu is remarkable in many of its particulars, both
biographical and intellectual. Indeed, his efforts in a broad array of fields—as a pioneer
in the field of Japanese mycology, as a literary translator of several key works of
medieval Japanese literature, as an early contributor to the British tradition of global
comparative folklore studies, as a folklore collector and critical thinker who played a key
role in the formation of an endogenous Japanese tradition of folklore studies known as
minzokugaku, as a theoretician and activist who is rightly regarded as the Father of
Japanese ecology, and as an epistemological thinker who successfully fused Esoteric
Buddhist cosmology and Western empirical inquiry—are so considerable and varied that
numerous scholars in a wide range of fields have, in recent years, touched on one or
another aspect of his life and work. In an era when many of these emergent disciplines
were first embarking on their own courses of historical development, he actively explored
them all and left footprints that point to lines of inquiry which remain not only relevant,
but as prescient as they were in his own time.
While a number of aspects of his work have been taken up and examined for
discipline-specific purposes by contemporary scholars, it is also the case that nothing like
a complete portrait of his body of work is available in English. The noted British
folklorist Carmen Blacker, looking at his contributions to her field has called him
“Japan’s Neglected Genius.” Historian and historiographer Gerald Figal has examined –
at some length -- his role in the modernization of Japan and the development of a
domestic tradition in the social sciences, particularly psychology. Bernard Faure, William
2
Sibley, Gregory Pflugfelder, and Alan Christy have all dealt with his work as a sexologist
and pioneer of the Japanese branches of what are now called Gender Studies and Queer
Studies and applied them to topics ranging from the treatment of sexuality within
Buddhism to the study of rural development and modernization in Japan. John Driscoll,
drawing on elements of that same body of work, along with some of Minakata’s early
contributions to the field of abnormal psychology, has opened a window into the sexual
politics of Japanese Imperialism and the commodification of desire in the Japanese
Empire during the first half of the twentieth-century. Julia Adeney-Thomas, Brij Tankha
and Kato Sadomichi have all produced valuable works examining his contributions to the
construction of “Nature” as a category of thought and study, the introduction of
“ecology” to Japan, and early Japanese environmental activism, respectively. J.Y Wong
has documented his pivotal role as the conduit through which Sun Yat-sen became aware
of Pan-Asian thought, and the critical role their encounter played in Sun’s ultimately
successful efforts to win Japanese backing for his revolutionary struggle against the
decrepit Qin Dynasty. The noted Buddhologist Abe Ryūichi, and Cynthia Bogel, a
scholar specializing in Buddhist visual culture, have noted his contributions to modern
study of mikkyō, an early Japanese synthesis of the traditions best known in the West as
Tibetan or Tantric Buddhism.
Though each of these scholars has performed valuable labors within his or her
discipline, the received image of Minakata and his thought remains little more than a
quick sketch based on a series of factoids – his eidetic memory, reading knowledge of
seventeen European languages, keen eyesight, fondness for drink, tendency toward
belligerence, his many “articles” in Notes & Queries and Nature, his preparation of slime
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molds in taffy boxes for the Emperor, his epilepsy, and so forth.
It is not my intention to duplicate the work of my predecessors. Rather, building
on their work, along with an examination of Minakata’s voluminous (but curiously-
neglected) English-language publications, it is the aim of the present study to develop a
more complete overview of the inter-relationships between these various fields of activity
and the core notions that ran through his activities in all of these areas. It is my hope that,
in this way, I am following the distinctive tendency identified by Figal, who wrote:
“What seems to motivate Minakata’s intellectual activity are the gaps, rather than…the
fullness of the sciences in their treatment of natural and human phenomena.”
Figal’s characterization seems particularly resonant, for it was just such a gap, or
series of gaps at irregular junctures, that set me on the trail of Minakata Kumagusu. The
first was less a gap than a simple lack: the lack of a fixed roof over my head – and more
particularly, a place to bathe with any regularity -- when I entered UC-Santa Cruz as a
literature and creative writing major in January of 1985, intent on finishing an
undergraduate degree I had begun some years earlier at Michigan State University, but
failed to complete. The intervening years had been spent down the coast in Monterey and
I was convinced that I could shape that tale of time, half a decade spent in the belly of the
beast of New California cooking, into something that might compare favorably with
Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. For the moment, a steady unemployment
check took the place of Virginia Woolf’s fifty pounds a year, but I did not yet have a
room of my own, or a shower to go with it. What I did have was a car with reclining
seats, a manual typewriter, the need for physical activity that strikes most people who’ve
recently given up tobacco, and fully paid flat-fee tuition for one semester. It was then that