Douglas Howland

Translating the West : language and political reason in nineteenth-century Japan

This analysis of of the transformation of political thought in 19th century Japan examines the transmission to Japan of key concepts - liberty, rights, sovereignty, and society from Western Europe and the US. The Japanese had to invent terminology to engage Western political thought.

Samurai Status, Class, and Bureaucracy: A Historiographical Essay

Historically, tokugawa Samurai were a legal creation that grew out of the landed warriors of the medieval age; they came to be defined by the Tokugawa shogunate in terms of hereditary status, a right to hold public office, a right to bear arms, and a “cultural superiority” upheld through educational preferment (Smith 1988, 134). With the prominent exception of Eiko Ikegamis recent The Taming of the Samurai (1995), little has been written in English in the past two decades regarding the sociopolitical history of the samurai in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. E. H. Normans seminal work, Japans Emergence as a Modern State , established the parameters of debate among American historians of Japan from the 1950s through the 1970s. Drawing on the Marxist historiography of prewar Japan, Norman interpreted the Meiji Restoration in terms of class conflict: a modified bourgeois revolution directed against a feudal Tokugawa regime, led by a coalition of lower samurai and merchants, and supported by a peasant militia (Norman [1940] 1975).

The Dialectics of Chauvinism: Minority Nationalities and Territorial Sovereignty in Mao Zedong’s New Democracy

This article examines Mao Zedong’s theory of new democracy in order to explicate the relationship between minority nationalities and sovereignty within the state system of the People’s Republic of China. It argues that the position of minority nationalities in China has been overdetermined by territorial sovereignty in the identification of the Chinese peoples, with the result that minority nationalities are fixed within China because of the imperialist framework of the contemporary international order. Chinese government policy remains bound by a contradiction between imperialism and socialism, a dialectic that has created and determines the dialectics of chauvinism— that contradiction between the Han majority and the minority nationalities.

Sovereignty and the Laws of War: International Consequences of Japan's 1905 Victory over Russia

The Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905), recently commemorated with several international conference volumes, is identified by a majority of contributors as the first modern, global war. In making such a judgment, these scholars note its scale, its nationalism, its colonialism and geopolitical repercussions. What is surprising, however, is that no one has remarked on another significance: it was the first war in which both belligerents pledged to adhere to the international laws of war. In that regard, the Russo–Japanese War marks a culmination of the tireless international diplomacy to secure legal limitations on warfare in the nineteenth century. In 1904, both Russia and Japan justified their operations according to international law, for the benefit of an international audience who had five years earlier celebrated some progress with the signing of The Hague Conventions in 1899.

Personal liberty and public good : the introduction of John Stuart Mill to Japan and China

Introduction 1 On Liberty and Its Historical Conditions of Possibility Translation in Theory Translation Words and Lexical Fields The Historical Conditions of Possibility Individuality and Subjecthood Elite Education and the Ruling Class 2 Mill and His English Critics Self and Others The Individual as Ground of Liberty Negative and Positive Interpretations of Liberty Society and Morality as Ground of Liberty The Individual and the State 3 Nakamura Keiu and the Public Limits of Liberty Village Society and Government Christianity and the Personal Liberty of Conscience Free Trade 4 Yan Fu and the Moral Prerequisites of Liberty The Group and the Self Models of Private and Public from Chinese Antiquity Individuality as Moral Self-Cultivation The Boundaries of Authority: Mutual Encouragement and Local Administration 5 Personal Liberty and Public Virtue Mills Encouragement of Virtue Public Virtue and the Priority of Common Interests The Japanese State and Its Subjects The Reconstruction of the Chinese People Conclusion Notes Bibiliography Index

The Sinking of the S.S. Kowshing: International Law, Diplomacy, and the Sino-Japanese War

In July 1894, the Japanese navy sank the British steamship Kowshing , leased by China to transport troops to Korea. Diplomatic negotiations over compensation for the loss of the ship persisted for the next decade. In insisting upon Chinas responsibility, the British Foreign Office forsook the judgments of international legal experts and demonstrated that its main goals were to support British commercial interests and to encourage the position of Japan in East Asia. The surprising denoument of the Kowshing incident was Chinas payment of damages for the ship in 1903.

Introduction: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Art and Sovereignty

The evocative power and dynamic range of art resonate with the operations of sovereignty. Art’s objects, mediums, and styles are deeply involved with the construction of political communities, just as notions of sovereignty—especially conceptual and institutional manifestations of its modern forms—draw upon artistic representation and performance. Not only do artists and artworks make claims to sovereignty for the sake of multiple communities, but art has long been part and parcel of sovereign practices in their many implications and aspirations. By examining issues related to art and sovereignty in a cohesive manner, we propose a common analytical and theoretical ground for a new field of interdisciplinary research. The dialogue among disciplinary perspectives—that to date have been unconnected or disparate—reveals that artistic and political spheres are variously linked, overlapping, and co-evolving. While not aiming to demonstrate a causal relationship between art and sovereignty, we examine ways in which notions about art are placed in a productive tension with the meanings and practices of sovereignty and vice versa.

The International Movement to Protect Literary and Artistic Property

The 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works sought to harmonize different conceptions of the artist’s rights in his intellectual creation in order to universalize the protection of literary and artistic works. The protection of art as property not only asserted a new relation between art and law, but also engaged another global transformation under way: the coproduction of national and international law. The Berne Convention relied on national legislative sovereignties to fulfill its goal of international protection for an artist’s property. In so doing, the Berne Convention negotiated a new international public domain, in conjunction with which the rights of individual artists would find an internationally protected space.

Directions for Future Research on Art, Sovereignty, and Global Affairs

Critical analyses of the art-and-sovereignty nexus demonstrate that art is inextricable from global affairs and from sovereignty in its various forms. Art and sovereignty relate to each other in ways that are much more complex and changeable than suggested by the notion of separate academic fields. While it is misleading to treat art and sovereignty separately in explorations of world politics, collapsing the two terms is also a misrepresentation. Art and sovereignty are best viewed as coconstitutive. Based on insights gained from our chapters—each of which examines a specific case of mutual constitution of art and sovereignty—this concluding section advances possible directions for future research on topics located at the intersection of art, sovereignty, and global affairs. Whether deliberate or on an unconscious level, art can raise questions about group allegiance and emotional belonging, as well as issues related to the heterogeneity of populations within territorial boundaries. Tracing the life of artworks offers opportunities to articulate concepts of material agency, the role of religion, and deep time in relation to practices of sovereign self-determination. Finally, we raise the question whether and how artworks are themselves sovereign.

Territorial Sovereignty and Extraterritorial Privilege

International legal positivists emphasized treaties as international agreements grounded in the state’s authority to establish and to enforce law based on its capacity as a sovereign power. The unfair treaties that Japan signed between 1858 and 1869 offered Japan the opportunity to develop an expertise in treaty law—especially in order to maintain its territorial integrity and to assert sovereignty over its territory. As the Japanese government successfully argued in the 1870s, Japan may have granted judicial jurisdiction to foreign consuls, but it retained legislative jurisdiction, and foreigners in Japanese territory were bound to obey the laws of Japan. An analysis of the foreign residents’ claims to rights to travel and to hunt in Japan demonstrates that a command of international law was key to Japanese control of Japanese territory.