Panel: Reconstructing Historical Biography
Copanelists: Philip Holden and Mary Louise Penaz
Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) was one of the ideological leaders of the movement that led to the Meiji Restoration, the most sweeping socio-political change in the history of Japan. He was executed by the Shogun regime. Robert Louis Stevenson writes about Shoin in a brief biographical essay (1905), comparing him to Garibaldi and John Brown.
There are reportedly about 200 biographies or biographical studies of Shoin published in Japanese during the past century. Writers have given significantly varied interpretations to the tragic life of Shoin, reflecting the political agenda of the period when they wrote. In the early modern period, when Japan hurried to construct a new national identity to combat the threat of Western colonialism, Shoin was depicted as an exemplary Japanese man who had risked his life in resistance against the hegemonic power. One of the biographies, translated into Chinese, inspired the Chinese revolution that overthrew the Chin Dynasty. During World War II, on the other hand, biographers participated in the “Die for the Emperor” discourse by foregrounding the Confucian virtue of loyalty with Shoin’s. Post-war Marxists interpret Shoin as a revolutionary thinker, while right-wing intellectuals portray him as a nationalist martyr dedicated to the Imperial Restoration.
The purpose of this paper is to provide yet another way of translating Shoin’s life that becomes possible by reconstructing his inner-self as linguistically and discursively expressed in 245 letters addressed to more than 60 people. Shoin was indeed a transformer of the identity of Japanese men, showing remarkable foresight as he innovatively replaced old samurai first person pronouns with a new pronoun signaling “modern self,” and he was a forerunner of the linguistic movement Genbunitchi (unification of written and spoken language), as he wrote his letters using a code-mixing style, violating the convention of writing in Chinese, the norm of scholarly behavior.
Katsue A. Reynolds is Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai’i at Mänoa. The author and editor of numerous books and articles on issues in language and gender, her research interests include sociolinguistics, with a focus on gender and changing aspects of the Japanese language and culture, phatic communication, and critical discourse analysis.