Man, Woman, Abacus: A Tale of Enlightenment

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Woman, Man, Abacus:

A Tale of Enlightenment
Hansun Hsiung
Harvard University
Rather than become embroiled in a noisy discussion of the merits of equal rights, I would direct attention only to an aspect that anyone can easily understand after we have taken up a simple point that is close at hand. This simple point is neither religious nor theoretical. Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Numerical Equality of Men and Women, Meiroku zasshi (1875) Why should anyone in the western world, in this day of versatile office calculating machines and mammoth electronic computers, waste his time learning how to use a simple abacus? There are several reasons. Martin Gardner, The Japanese Abacus Explained (1963)
t had all the makings of a tale of Enlightenment. After serving as charg daffaires of the first Japanese Legation to the United States, Mori Arinori (18471889) took it as his mission, upon his return to Tokyo in the summer of 1873, to lead Japan out of its self-incurred immaturity. Stopping in London on his way home, Mori breath[ed] in the John Bullatmosphere and met with leading Victorian intellectuals,
I would like to thank Andrew Gordon and the participants in his graduate seminar, David Howell, and the anonymous referee for their valuable criticism.
Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 72.1 (2012): 142
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such as Herbert Spencer (18201903), Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 1895), Thomas Carlyle (17951881), and the Orientalist Max Mller (18231900).1 A few months later, he confided in a letter to his friend, the Boston merchant Edward W. Kinsley (18291891), that he wished to introduce into Asia all kinds of good modern Europeism [sic] and, Americanism.2 Not long after his return to Japan, Mori, true to his word, published an article in Meiroku zasshi , calling for the abolition of concubinage and the equal treatment of men and women.3 Mori must have understood that his call for gender equality would stir controversy in the Japanese intellectual world. In the same letter to Kinsley, he had also confided a sense of alienation and foreboding: I am, here at home, made a foreigner because of too much breath I breathed in while abroad . . . [in] the great free community of [the] North American Continent.4 Around the time of writing these words, Mori founded the Meiji Six Society (Meirokusha ), a bimonthly gathering of leading intellectuals who sought to further the education of the nation.5 Half a year later, in March 1874, the Society began to publish its proceedings under the title of Meiroku zasshi. Moris article opposing concubinage appeared only two months after the inaugural issue of Meiroku zasshi. This was less than five years after John Stuart Mill, in his The Subjection of Women, provoked English audiences by positing that the legal subordination of one sex to the otheris wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.6 Although some Japanese readers were likely
1 Mori Arinori to Ed. W. Kinsley Esq., 16 May 1873. SC70, Edward W. Kinsley Correspondence, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 2 Mori Arinori to Mr. Kinsley, 7 October 1873. SC70, Edward W. Kinsley Correspondence, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 3 Mori issued a total of five articles in Meiroku zasshi: Saishron ichi , Meiroku zasshi 8 (May 1874); Saishron ni , Meiroku zasshi 11 ( June 1874); Saishron san , Meiroku zasshi 15 (August 1874);Saishron yon , Meiroku zasshi 20 (November 1874); Saishron go , Meiroku zasshi 27 (February 1875). These have been reprinted in Meiroku zasshi, 3 vols., ed. Yamamuro Shinichi and Nakanome Tru (Iwanami bunko, 2009) [hereafter MZ], 1:27678, 36669; 2:5357, 18890, 35358. See also Mori Arinori, On Wives and Concubines, parts 15, Meiroku zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment, trans. and ed. William Reynolds Braisted (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 1045, 14345, 18991, 25253, 33133. 4 Mori Arinori to Mr. Kinsley, 7 October 1873. 5 Meirokusha, Meirokusha seiki (Meirokusha, 1874), p. 1. 6 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869; 2nd ed., New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1870), p. 1.
Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality
already familiar with Mills work at the time of Moris initial article, the majority doubtless had to wait until 1878 for a partial translation into Japanese.7 Nonetheless, the controversy, referred to widely in the popular press as the debate over the equal rights of men and women (danjo dkenron ), managed through its own internal power to embroil such prominent men as Tsuda Shind (18291903), Kat Hiroyuki (18361916), Sakatani Shiroshi (18221881), and Nakamura Masanao (18321891), all of whom issued several articles on male-female equality and, in particular, on the topic of concubinage.8 There is not a wagon driver, coolie, grocer, or fishmonger these days, declared the Yomiuri shinbun in mid-1874, who, without even knowing its meaning, fails to speak of the equal rights of men and women to any and every one around him.9 In sketching the contours of the debate, one could quarrel, as the participants themselves did, over differences in terminology, such as equality (dt ) versus equal rights (dken ), and husband and wife (ffu ) versus men and women (danjo ).10 Overall, though, a latent consensus reigned concerning which terms were central and took precedence in decisions about whether or not Japan should adopt a more progressive gender policy. On the surface, Meiroku writers pitted civilization (bunmei ) against barbarism (banzoku ), a reference to the concept wherein history proceeded through fixed evolutionary stages from barbarity to civilization.11
7 The translation by Fukama Naiki consisted of only the first two chapters of The Subjection of Women; see John Stuart Mill, Danjo dkenron , trans. Fukama Naiki (Tky shorin, 1878). The entirety of Mills treatise would later appear in Japanese, in a translation by Nogami Nobuyuki , under the title Fujin kaih no genri (Rybunkan, 1921). 8 For a concise chronological summary, see Shibukawa Hisako , Meiroku zasshi ni okeru sho rons , Nihon shis rons shi , ed. Imai Jun and Ozawa Tomio (Perikansha, 1979), pp. 32736. 9 Hakichigaeta danjo dken ga k, ffu de ha tagai o taisetsu ni , , Yomiuri shinbun , July 5, 1875, early edition, p. 2; also quoted in Sekiguchi Sumiko , Go-isshin to jendaa: Ogy Sorai kara kyiku chokugo made , 2nd ed. (Tky daigaku shuppan, 2005), p. 362 n. 397. 10 On the significance of linguistic variation, see Sekiguchi, Go-isshin to jendaa, pp. 131 33. On the general use of danjo dken, consider the distinctions between equal rights and equality made by Kat Hiroyuki in Meiroku zasshi 31 (March 1875), in MZ, 2:7380. 11 See Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
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Echoing Mills comment on human improvement, Mori noted that gender equality was necessary to aid and further civilization , lest Japan become the single greatest nation of lechers on this globe .12 Despite the allegedly universal nature of civilization, however, most writers were ultimately unable to rise above thinking in terms of an East-West divide; gender equality meant being more like Europe and less like Asia. In his final contribution to the debate, Mori himself assumed that British common law should be the basis for legal reforms that would protect marriage as a free contract between man and woman in Japan.13 In contrast, Tsuda Shind demonstrated that one could still adopt the stance of an East-West polarity without idealizing gender equality. Tsuda began by agreeing that the East lagged behind the West in its movement toward civilization. To buttress his point, he referenced the doctrine of the separation of the sexes (ffu ybetsu ), noting that it originated from Mencius. Nations such as China, mired in Confucian tradition, were to be censured for their blind adherence to the past (inishie o mshin su ). However, Tsuda also pointed out that even in the West, gender equality had not yet been fully accepted as a universal norm. This being the case, Tsuda concluded, it would be unwise for Japan to enforce equality between men and women.14 Voicing yet another viewpoint, Kat Hiroyuki looked to European customs as a counterexample; he claimed that the West was actually in a state of gender inequality, wherein women received greater privileges than men. From his perspective, the West, ironically, testified to the dangers of gender equality carried too far.15 That such a debate took place in Japan during the 1870sand that the phrase equality of husband and wife (ffu dken ) was, by 1875, a buzzword of the day [ryk no gen ], scattered
Mori Arinori, Saishron san, 2:56; Saishron yon, 2:190. Mori Arinori, Saishron go, 3:35358. 14 Tsuda Shind, Ffu ybetsuron , Meiroku zasshi 22 (December, 1874), in MZ, 2:242; Tsuda Shind, Ffu dken ben , Meiroku zasshi 35 (April 1875), in MZ, 3:19497. 15 Kat Hiroyuki, Ffu dken no ryheiron and Ffu dken no ryheiron dai-ni , Meiroku zasshi 31 (March 1875), in MZ, 3:7377, 7780.
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across the pages of every newspapershould constitute a familiar narrative of the political possibilities following the Meiji Restoration.16 The early Meiji period was a time when the promise of liberalism gave birth to vibrant oppositional movements against a more conservative, gradualist state.17 Therefore it is not surprising that Fukuzawa Yukichi (18351901)a figure who has come to symbolize Meiji civilization and enlightenmentalso expressed his views on the subject in the pages of Meiroku zasshi. Fukuzawas belief that men and women claimed equal status as human subjects had already been made clear in Gakumon no susume , Fukuzawas most famous work and one of the bestsellers of the Meiji period. By mid-1875, he had elaborated the implications of this equal status in Bunmeiron no gairyaku , his major theoretical text on the concept of civilization.18 Fukuzawa was a champion of Japans flight from semi-barbarism, and a partisan of the advancements made by Western knowledge. Few readers would likely have batted an eye when Fukuzawa, in agreement with Mori, came out in support of danjo dken. Yet upon careful reading, Fukuzawas treatise, entitled Danjo dsron (The numerical equality of men and women) gives rise to some unexpected tensions. Offered as a rejoinder to Kats article, which in turn had been submitted as a critique of Bunmeiron no gairyaku, Fukuzawas contribution did indeed support gender equality. But its tone and strategy stood at odds with the articles of his interlocutors and his image as a so-called Enlightenment intellectual. Expressing frustration at the futile arguments (mizukakeron ) of his interlocutors, Fukuzawa opted to remain free of a noisy discussion of the merits of equal rights and direct attention only to an aspect that anyone can easily understand after we have taken up a simple point that is close at hand. He thus cut through the debate over whether
Tsuda Shind, Ffu ybetsuron, 3:194. Stephen Vlastos, Opposition Movements in Early Meiji, 18681885, in The Emergence of Meiji Japan, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 203; Carol Gluck, Japans Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 1721. 18 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Gakumon no susume (18721876), in Fukuzawa Yukichi zensh , 20 vols., ed. Kei gijuku (Iwanami shoten, 19581971) [hereafter FYZ], 3:81; Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku (1875), in FYZ, 4:146.
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gender equality was truly the path to civilization, or whether emulating the West might be detrimental to the Japanese polity. Fukuzawa perceived the need to begin from a standpoint beyond any theory of historical stages or any specific references to European customs. Shedding arguments couched in East-West binaries, Fukuzawa wished to proceed from fundamental and universal first principlesto understand what men and women really are, and to clarify what rights really are . 19 Here, Fukuzawas concrete position in the gender debate was not at all obvious to his readers. As he emphasized, the simple point . . . close at hand of which he spoke was, neither religious nor theoretical, but rather a matter deriving from the abacusthe numerical equality of men and women, that all can easily comprehend
. Substituting the word numbers for rights, Fukuzawa
contended that any argument about the equality of husband and wife (ffu dken) should first be based on an argument about the numerical equality of men and women (danjo ds ). This numerical equality was the first stage of equal rights (dken no shodan ). Polygamy, he maintained, was undesirable because it does not conform to calculations on the abacus .20 If Fukuzawas meaning appears unclear today, it is because his argument was hinged upon two particular lines of argument whose logic is rather counterintuitive. The first pertains to his decisive dismissal of all the previous terms that had defined the discourse on gender equality. Fukuzawa made no reference to legal or social precedents in foreign countries or to the rhetoric of civilization and barbarism; and he did not denigrate China or Confucian superstition. Yet, more fundamentally, his metaphoric invocation of calculations on the abacus is itself puzzling. It is difficult to decipher how the abacus enabled him to relate numerical equality to political equality. That is to say: what exactly did he mean by the numerical equality of men and women, and how did calculations on the abacus correspond to equal rights?
19 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Danjo dsron, Meiroku zasshi 31 (March 1875), in FYZ, 19:552. In English, see Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Equal Numbers of Men and Women, Meiroku zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment, pp. 38585. 20 Fukuzawa, Danjo dsron, 19:552.
Tongue-in-Cheek Evasions
Although scholars widely acknowledge the importance of the Meiroku gender debate to Meiji intellectual history,21 secondary sources offer little aid in addressing the mystery posed by Fukuzawas article. Relevant scholarship is scarce in part because the essay Numerical Equality has been omitted from several important collections, such as Chikuma Shobs Gendai Nihon shis taikei , which dedicated a separate volume to Fukuzawa. This lacuna is all the more noticeable because the preceding volume, titled Kindai no hga (Sprouts of modernity), included five of Moris essays on gender.22 A decade later, the same publisher Chikuma Shobs follow-up series, Kindai Nihon shis taikei , set aside another whole volume for Fukuzawa, but again skipped over the Numerical Equality article.23 One might attribute the lack of attention paid to Fukuzawas article to the neglect of gender as a subject of historical analysis. The renowned Nihon kindai shis taikei , published by Iwanami shoten, represented Fukuzawa as a thinker of class relations, education, economics, empire, and science, as well as an innovator of modern Meiji prose and a pioneer of new techniques of translation. Only once were Fukuzawas gender concerns given their due, through his writings on prostitution.24 Similarly, Heibonshas much earlier attempt at a source compendiumthe Nihon tetsugaku shis zensho seriesincluded Fukuzawas treatises on education, history, and trade but contained no section on gender that might have accommodated the essay Numerical Equality.25
21 See Albert M. Craig, Enlightenment Thinkers of the Meirokusha: On Marriage, Sources of Japanese Tradition (1958; 2nd ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 2:710; Shibukawa, Meiroku zasshi ni okeru sho rons, pp. 32736. 22 See Gendai Nihon shis taikei (19631968), vol. 2, ed. Ienaga Sabur (Chikuma shob, 1963); Mori Arinori, Saishron, in Gendai Nihon shis taikei, vol. 1, ed. Matsumoto Sannosuke (Chikuma shob, 1966), pp. 35763. 23 Ishida Takeshi , ed., Kindai Nihon shis taikei (1975 1990), vol. 2 (Chikuma shob, 1975). 24 See Nihon kindai shis taikei , 25 vols., various editors (Iwanami shoten, 198892), 2:36470; 6:2026, 26567; 8:25759, 26568; 10:2023, 3559, 11724, 13336, 20510; 11:34, 27375, 35860; 12:31214, 393400; 13:7384, 27786; 14:10112; 15:335, 3742; 16:4374, 35356, 37576; 22:18390, 26063, 26870, 34045. 25 See Nihon tetsugaku shis zensho, 21 vols., various editors (Heibonsha, 195557), 15:297304; 18:267312.
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Even works of historiography that were self-consciously concerned with the gender problematic performed their own maneuvers of elision. Carmen Blacker equated Fukuzawas early views about gender to those of Mori, noting: Fukuzawas ideas on marriage . . . were shared from an early date by Mori Arinori, who . . . published in the Meiroku Zasshi of 1874 an article entitled Saishron (On Wives and Concubines).26 Forgoing any analysis of the Numerical Equality article, she passed over the 1870s to consider only Fukuzawas later publications: Nihon fujinron (1885), Hinkron (1885), Danjo ksairon (1886), Onna daigaku hyron (1899), and Shin onna daigaku (1899).27 Gregory Pflugfelder similarly cited in one breath such spokesmen of Japanese enlightenment as Mori Arinori and Fukuzawa Yukichi when he described the civilized morality of male-female sexuality enshrined in marriage debates.28 On one level, Blacker and Pflugfelder are correct: Fukuzawa did agree with many of Moris substantive conclusions; he even served as witness to Moris own marriage to Hirose Tsune, the first civil contract marriage in Japan.29 Blacker, in particular, recognized differences between the two menFukuzawa never supported womens suffrage or equal participation in education, and he accepted prostitution as a necessary vice.30 Yet Blackers and Pflugfelders works are problematic because they failed to treat Fukuzawas Numerical Equality on its own terms as an important engagement with the Meiroku zasshi debate. As a result, they missed out on the key point I made above that Fukuzawas argument wholly bypassed the structure of reason deployed by his interlocutors. No matter how Western one
26 Carmen Blacker, Fukuzawa Yukichi on Husband-Wife Relationships, in Japanese Women: Emerging from Subservience, 18681945, ed. Hiroko Tomida and Gordon Daniels (Kent, Eng.: Global Oriental, 2005), p. 155 n. 3. 27 The same maneuver occurred earlier in Carmen Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 7889. This book, too, ignores the essay Numerical Equality. 28 Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 149. 29 Ishikawa Mikiaki , Fukuzawa Yukichi den (Iwanami shoten, 1932), 2:463. The contract itself, with Fukuzawas name as witness (shnin ) was reprinted either in full or condensed in some of these papers, such as the Tky Nichi-nichi shinbun . See Maruyama Makoto , ed., Fukuzawa Yukichi kenky shiry shsei: djidai hen : (zorasha, 1998), 1:15557. 30 See Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment, p. 89; Sekiguchi, Go-isshin to jendaa, pp. 26977.
finds his methods, Fukuzawa had attempted to cut through the rhetoric about the West employed by other Meiji writers and articulate a set of first principles on which to stake gender equality. These first principles were to be simple and universal, free from the constraints of the particularities of time, space, or place. The potential ingenuity of Fukuzawas argument, a feature uniquely different from the arguments of Mori or other Meiroku zasshi contributors, remains unexplored. To be sure, a few select texts have begun to map out this terrain. In her groundbreaking work on gender between the Tokugawa and Meiji eras, Sekiguchi Sumiko analyzed Fukuzawas article on numerical equality as a strategy of evasion. Sekiguchi claimed that Fukuzawa, by shifting the terms of the debate away from the question of equal rights and reframing it in terms of equal numbers, allowed himself to avoid the hairy question addressed by Mori and others: what are the relative merits of asserting substantive equality versus treating women as separate but equal?31 Next, the editors of the Fukuzawa Yukichi sensh , a collection of selected works by Fukuzawa, instructed the reader to interpret the Numerical Equality piece as a harbinger of ideas that would be more fully developed in the later work Hinkron.32 Finally, Albert Craig, although not addressing numerical equality in his Civilization and Enlightenment, deserves praise for including the piece in the second edition of Sources of Japanese Tradition. In this latter work, Craig grouped together all the Meiroku zasshi articles comprising the gender debate as an emblem of the intellectual ferment of the period. More revealing of Craigs thought, however, is his preface to Fukuzawas Numerical Equality essay: there, he acknowledged that Fukuzawa was an early and outspoken advocate of womens rights. The Numerical Equality essay itself, however, was, for Craig, executed in tongue-in-cheek fashion. Fukuzawa uses numbers, Craig claimed, in a question that, he [Fukuzawa] realizes, has little to do with mathematics.33 On account of its tongue-incheek frivolity, Fukuzawas Numerical Equality essay was excised in
Sekiguchi, Go-isshin to jendaa, pp. 25758. Tomita Masafumi , Kki , in Fukuzawa Yukichi sensh, ed. Fukuzawa Yukichi Chosaku Hensankai (Iwanami shoten, 19511952), 5:408; Fukuzawa Yukichi, Hinkron (1885), in FYZ, 5:54778. 33 Albert M. Craig, Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Equal Numbers of Men and Women, in Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2nd ed. (2005), 2:713.
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the later collection Sources of East Asian Tradition, while the other Meiroku zasshi articles were preserved.34 Although Sekiguchi, the Sensh editors, and Craig all differ in their specific analyses, they are alike in bypassing questions about the mode of argument, or logic, of Fukuzawas piece, focusing instead on Fukuzawas substantive conclusions and their implications. For Sekiguchi, a deft evasion signaled an intellectual failureFukuzawas lack of engagement with gender equality, on which his personal record, as it turns out, was not so immaculate. However, by neglecting to elaborate upon the specific meaning of numerical equality, Sekiguchis thesis is open to a major challenge. If Fukuzawas recourse to numerical equality was merely an evasion, then why did he choose to speak of numbers at all? Out of all the possible ways to deflect the debate, why might Fukuzawa have chosen calculations on the abacus, a phrase seemingly irrelevant to the topic of gender? In concentrating only on the ultimate effects of Fukuzawas argument, Sekiguchis analysis cannot account for the apparent strangeness of Fukuzawas approach. Next, the Sensh, which treated the Numerical Equality essay as a dress rehearsal for Hinkron, also shifted attention away from Fukuzawas numerical reasoning. Fukuzawa framed Hinkron, an essay on prostitution, as a critique of the moral conduct of Japanese men toward women. Although he once, in an offhand manner, employed the phrase equal numbers during the course of discussion, he in no way dwelled on the idea that numerical equality begets political equality. Instead, Hinkrons connection to the Numerical Equality essay derived from a brief note of pragmatic compromise made by Fukuzawa at the end of the latter work. After arguing that men and women are equal because they are equal in number, Fukuzawa concluded that if outlawing concubinage would be impossible in the near future, then one should at least hide these practices from view. According to Fukuzawa, things hidden were, by connotation, shameful. By hiding concubinage, then, one might have been able to stir up enough moral disapprobation so as eventually to abolish it forever.35 In Hinkron Fukuzawa similarly recommended that prostitution be hidden, but he defended this proposal with a completely different logic. Rather than attempting to find a tran34 Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, in Sources of East Asian Tradition, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 2:486. 35 Fukuzawa, Danjo dsron, 19:552; Fukuzawa, Hinkron, 5:56669.
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shistorical basis for his argument, he explicitly treated the behavior of males toward females in relation to the succession of Japans historical stages, from the barbarism of the Ashikaga shogunate up through the cusp of civilization in the Meiji period. To support his argument, Fukuzawa used an abundance of particular examples to show that Japan was fundamentally different from Europe; he thereby justified his preferred gender policy using a significantly different approach from that of his Numerical Equality article. Owing to certain conditions peculiar to Japan that cannot be found in any other civilized country, Fukuzawa wrote, prostitution should not be eliminated, but merely hidden.36 In sum, Hinkron and the Numerical Equality essay were similar only to the extent that they arrived at parallel conclusions. Summing up the perspectives of Sekiguchi and the Sensh editors, Craig illustrated their commonality nicely, demonstrating clearly that for these contemporary scholars, Fukuzawas mode of argument was unimportant. According to Craig, Fukuzawas Numerical Equality article was tongue-and-cheek; its use of numbers was a joke, to be ignored in favor of the underlying point. Gender equality, he stated, has little to do with mathematics.37 In short, all these commentators fixated on whether Fukuzawa was for or against gender equality, while downplaying the strange reasons Fukuzawa offered to support his argument. Neither of these viewpoints is wrong. Fukuzawas essay obscures, evades, and prefigures. Its clashing admixture of abaci, women, and men seems to create a bizarre collage rather than a rigorous argument. Yet the bizarrerie deserves attention because it challenges us to ask whether an article on a serious topic with a serious audience in a serious periodical might actually have meant both everything it said, and also the quite serious manner in which it said it. Clues suggest Fukuzawa was serious about the use of numerical reasoning in the gender debate. The simplest of these clues is that as late as 1899, in a series of Jiji shinp articles that later became Onna daigaku hyron, Fukuzawa still found it important enough to note that in the human world, the numbers of men and women are the same (danjo ds ).38
Fukuzawa, Hinkron, 5:573. Craig, Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Equal Numbers of Men and Women, 2:713. 38 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Onna daigaku hyron fu shin onna daigaku ( Jiji shinp, 1899), pp. 12.
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Although he mentioned this only in passing, and without further elaboration, the fact that twenty years later he would retain the same terms indicates that they were important to him. To determine why this was, I shall shift my focus from Fukuzawas substantive theses to an examination of his reasoning in all its humor, inanity, and apparent illegibility. Thus I return to the questions posed earlier: what exactly was the numerical equality of men and women, why was it a matter of calculations on the abacus, and how did this connect to equal rights?
Numerical Equality
Fukuzawas Numerical Equality article, focused primarily on a discussion of polygamy, clearly claimed that equality was a positive statistical fact. According to Fukuzawa, the number of men and women in the world is roughly the same; hence the calculation [ ] that one man and one woman should become husband and wife
. Intimations of this view date back at least to a letter
of 1870 on the morality of familial bonds. There, Fukuzawa wrote that husband and wife are the model of all human morality, since at the very beginning, when heaven gave rise to human beings, there must have been one man and one woman.39 Subsequently, in mid-1874, Fukuzawa cited the study of a certain Westerner who had shown that male and female populations maintained a tolerably equal ratio of twenty-one men for every twenty women in the world. From this Fukuzawa concludedand this was a year prior to the Numerical Equality articleit is clear that for one husband to take two or three wives fundamentally contradicts the Laws of Nature [tenri ].40 The argument may seem strange to us today. Within the broader scope of the history of ideas, however, Fukuzawa was already in good company when, in 1870, he articulated the notion that heaven began by creating one man and one woman, thereby authorizing natural grounds for monogamous husband-wife relationships. Earlier in the eighteenth century, Johann Gottfried Herder (17441803) had, in his own history, emphasized the importance of a fair equality in the
39 40
Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nakatsu rybetsu no sho , in FYZ, 20:5051. Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, in FYZ, 3:82.
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births of both sexes. For Herder, the equality of the sexes was proof against Thomas Hobbess view that nature attempted to increase, rather than to minimize, strife between persons.41 But between 1870 and 1874 when the eighth volume of Gakumon no susume was published, Fukuzawa had found different company. This company was the anonymous Westerner whom Fukuzawa had referenced when presenting his 21:20 ratio in Gakumon no susume: Henry Thomas Buckle (18211862). Buckle had introduced the example of male-female population ratios early on in his History of Civilization in England, in a chapter on the virtues of aggregate statistical analysis. Fukuzawas reference to Buckle marked a crucial shift in the meaning of numerical equality. In 1870, Fukuzawa had conceived of numerical equality as a principle expressed in a moment of heavenly genesis, a perfect ratio of one to one. In 1874, he thought about it empirically, in terms of population surveys, which yielded an estimate of twenty-one to twenty. It was a shift from cosmological truth to positive statistical fact. As Buckle put it, The proportion kept up in the births of the sexes was a beautiful instance of the regularity with which, under the most conflicting circumstances, the great Laws of Nature are able to hold their course.42 Previous scholars, whom Buckle chastised, had sought the answer to reproductive ratios in the physiology of individual humans, examining how body type, diet, and lifestyle contributed to the sex of offspring. According to Buckle, these studies were ultimately useless; only via a comprehensive survey of facts could one eliminate the problematic variations of the individual and eliminate those disturbances which, owing to the impossibility of experiment, we shall never be able to isolate.43 Buckles championing of comprehensive data gathering is frequently cited today as one of the most passionate expressions of a shift in thinking between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that opened the grounds for the modern social sciences in Europe.44
41 Ein ziemliches Gleichmass in den Geburten beider Geschlechter, in Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. Wolfgang Pross (178491; Munich: Carl Hanser, 2002), p. 289. 42 Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton & Co., 1858), 1:121. 43 Buckle, History of Civilization in England 1:125. 44 T. M. Porter, Private Chaos, Public Order: The Nineteenth-Century Statistical Revolution, in Probability since 1800: Interdisciplinary Studies of Scientific Development:
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In brief, the analysis of social phenomena during the eighteenth century was still embedded in a paradigm that focused on rational individual behavior, and perceived the momentum of society as deriving from the singular, purposive actions of individual agents. Then, in the nineteenth century, the concept of society as sui generis arose.45 Social scientists began to perceive macroscopic patterns that existed regardless of the thoughts and actions of each actor in society. Borrowing Lorraine Dastons memorable formulation, society changed from being law-governed because it was an aggregate of rational individuals to being law-governed in spite of its . . . individual members.46 Guiding this new thinking was the emerging discipline of statistics, for which Buckle served as a famous representative voice. Fukuzawa had begun to read Buckle in the early 1870s, around the same time he was reading works by Spencer, Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 1859). Furthermore Buckles History of Civilization in England played a major role in Fukuzawas writing of Bunmeiron no gairyaku.47 To be sure, Fukuzawa was not in complete agreement with Buckle, especially when it came to the subject of determinism. Buckle believed in a strong model of causation that in the final analysis derived from geographyfour classes of physical agents, namely, climate, food, soil, and the general aspect of nature.48 Fukuzawa, in contrast, believed that the engines of history were, in the final analysis, moved by a nations spiritits level of knowledge and virtue. Despite this difference, Fukuzawa quite vocally endorsed the method of statistics for the study of civilizations. Probable patterns in a country, Fukuzawa wrote, cannot be discerned from one event or one thing. Actual conditions can only be determined by taking a broad
Workshop at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Bielefeld, September 1620, 1982, ed. Michael Heidelberger, Lorenz Krger, and Rosemarie Rheinwald (Bielefeld: Universitt Bielefeld, 1983), pp. 2741, esp. p. 34. 45 Most succinctly, at centurys end, in mile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. Steven Lukes (1895; New York: Free Press, 1982), pp. 39, 54. 46 Lorraine J. Daston, Rational Individuals versus Laws of Society: From Probability to Statistics, in The Probabilistic Revolution, Volume I: Ideas in History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), p. 295. 47 Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, pp. 32, 11622; Inoki Takenori, Introduction, in Outline of a Theory of Civilization, by Fukuzawa Yukichi, trans. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst, III (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. xxvi. 48 Buckle, History of Civilization in England 1:2930; Inoki, Introduction, p. xxviii; Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, p. 117.
15
sampling and making minute comparisons. Fukuzawa grafted statistical methodology onto his own idealism, arguing that the changes of the human mind, when measured en masse and compared . . . over a long period of time would allow one to see the direction in which the countrys knowledge and virtue are heading. Ordering the world into aggregate numbers through statistics would make the spiritual questions of mankind, with all their seeming abstractions and multiplicities of individual desires, solidly graspable, tangible as a physical object as if we were looking at an objects physical shape or reading letters cut into a block of wood.49 Although Fukuzawa was directly endorsing Buckle in this passage, later in his life he would explain his methodological support more broadly as a vision of the foundational role of numbers and sciences (sri ) in the attainment of knowledge. Punning on a word that, at the time, broadly signified mathematics, he chose instead to parse sri separately into its two constitutent charactersnumber (s ) and science (ri ). In my interpretation of education, I try to coordinate all the physical actions of human beings by numbers and sciences, he explained, and then elaborated: I believe no one can escape the laws of numbers and sciences. For Fukuzawa, the world was just as much an order of nations as it was an order of digits.50 Statistics promised the possibility of eliminating loose metaphysics and establishing a more decisive realm of positive fact. Buried within the new statistical movement, however, were several significant political implications. More than a simple zeal for aggregate quantification, statistics was also, for nineteenth-century Europe, a movement51 caught between the growing power of society and an unwavering faith in the state. This proved particularly true for Buckles Victorian Britain, where practitioners of statistics, confronted by the social problems of
49 Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, in FYZ, 4:5456; Fukuzawa Yukichi, Outline of a Theory of Civilization, pp. 5758. 50 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Fuku jiden (1899), in FYZ, 7:167. In English, Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 21415. Kiyooka translates ri as reason, but I choose science following Maruyama Masao , who emphasizes that Fukuzawa appropriated traditional philosophical terms and redefined them within the context of a Newtonian inductive empiricism. See Maruyama Masao, Fukuzawa ni okeru jitsugaku no tenkai (1947), in Fukuzawa Yukichi no tetsugaku hoka roppen : (Iwanami Bunko, 2010), pp. 3665. 51 Porter, Private Chaos, Public Order, p. 30.
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industrial society, worked toward reform in sanitation, housing, and education not as an end, but as a means to meet the practical needs of administration. As Theodore M. Porter points out, statistics originally served as a science of the state, a tool that would facilitate orderly government.52 This pro-state, anti-revolutionary character of statistics deeply colored the very premises of Buckles own methodology. In his terms, statistics revealed the Laws of Nature, and the Laws of Nature exceeded the individual actions of any single man. Fukuzawa, too, articulated a strong notion of historical forces beyond great men, insisting on a universal motor, supra-human, that transcended human events.53 The consequence of such a doctrine was, for Buckle, advocacy for a brand of political gradualism. Insofar as the Laws of Nature would inevitably take their course, the wise legislator will ally himself with history, and allow to be achieved gradually what otherwise would be accomplished violently . . . to minimize the perturbations that disturb the social equilibrium.54 At the same time, the statist character of statistics also promoted various progressive tendencies. The rise of a numerical language for the understanding of the social world, while serving bureaucratic state apparatuses, was also a means of making these apparatuses more transparent to the general public. Numbers, unlike closeted deals brokered in hidden backrooms, were part of a new administrative toolkit that could lead to liberal government and democratic decision-making. Many nineteenth-century European thinkers argued that vast data sets enabled policymakers to transcend conflicts of culture and language by rendering the world into commensurable quantitative units. Unlike everyday language, numbers allowed for comparisons across different times and national borders with greater objective facility. Moreover, numeracy was less tied to distinct education and upbringing than was cultural knowledge. With numbers, one did not require a familiarity with canonical political texts or rhetoric. All humans, so statisticians claimed, could participate in the universality of numbers.55
Porter, Private Chaos, Public Order, p. 33. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment, p. 118. 54 Porter, Private Chaos, Public Order, p. 33. 55 Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 35, 7476, 80.
52 53
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Therefore, by even raising the possibility of an argument from aggregate statistics, Fukuzawa was signaling his pronounced distance from the arguments of his interlocutors in Meiroku zasshi. Mori, Kat, and Tsuda had made their case by way of anecdotes and casual folkethnographic observations, citing here and there practices in the West they had directly witnessed or else heard about, and then buttressing these observations with a doctrine of civilization versus barbarism. Fukuzawa, in contrast, countering with one simple statistical datum, offered a new approach to the problem of gendera social science approach that claimed to speak to readers regardless of their knowledge of the Japanese past or the Western present. In addition, through the invocation of statistical reasoning, he defused the over-politicization of gender for all parties involved while making his own political stance clear. Kat had stressed that the radical notion of gender equality would affect Japanese society negatively; Mori had stressed the progressiveness of gender equality as a positive aspect. Rooting the issue in statistics, Fukuzawa was suggesting that gender equality was neither radical nor progressive at all, but a descriptive feature of human society. Gender equality did not entail massive social change, but only the realignment of society with the original Laws of Nature. This new mode of argumentation was the initial stake, at least, in positing numerical equality as relevant to political equality. It corresponds with what Fukuzawa achieved in Gakumon no susume, when he first introduced statistical equality between men and women as a testament to the Laws of Nature. Yet in the Numerical Equality essay, Fukuzawa went one step further, departing from Gakumon no susume, as well as from any simple recapitulation of Buckle. When making his statistical case in Gakumon no susume, Fukuzawa had invoked those same Laws of Nature that characterized Buckles politics of gradualism. But a mere eleven months later, Fukuzawa did not speak about nature or laws at all in the Numerical Equality essay. Rather, he argued that inequality between man and woman was wrong not because it went against the Laws of Nature, but because it does not conform to calculations on the abacus. In the Numerical Equality essay, the link between fact and norm, between statistical equality and political equality, was the figure of calculations on the abacus (soroban no kanj ). What accounts for this change in Fukuzawas viewpoint? Fukuzawas line of reasoning is puzzling because the concept of numerical
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equality does not seem obviously connected to an abacus, which, after all, merely calculates. The puzzle is further complicated by two textual difficulties. In his History of English Civilization, Buckle used gender statistics simply to reinforce the elegance of his methodology. He did not attempt to draw any direct political implications from the statistical equality of men and women. Furthermore, when discussing this statistic, he primarily stressed that men and women were unequal rather than equal in number. Although at one point he used the phrase tolerably equal,56 what the beautiful law of statistics yielded for him was the fact that men always outnumbered women. We may confidently say, Buckle wrote, that although the operations of this law are of course liable to constant aberrations, the law itself is so powerful, that we know of no country in which during a single year the male births have not been greater than the female ones. On the same page, he twice reiterated this point: In every part of the world . . . there is . . . excess on the side of male births; and In no part of the world . . . are more girls born than boys.57 Did Fukuzawa deliberately misread Buckle, ignoring a fuzzy tolerable equality that was actually a statistic about inequality, all in order to conjure up a 1:1 ratio of rights from a 21:20 ratio of bodies? Quite mysteriously, right when Fukuzawa performed this sleight-ofhand, the abacus appeared, brandished about like a magic wand. For the Fukuzawa of the Numerical Equality essay, the abacus somehow seemed a better basis for argument than Laws of Nature, for the abacus made equal that which was unequal, and made normative that which was inert fact. Fukuzawa had set out to understand what men and women really are and to clarify what rights really are; in his own words, numerical equality was the first stage of equal rights. The stakes involved in making sense of his calculating abacus are therefore quite high. Unless we are simply to dismiss the Numerical Equality essay as an aberrant expression of ideas found in Gakumon no susume, we would do well to take seriously the work Fukuzawa took most seriously, in particular the work that Fukuzawa himself would regard as being among all my writings and translations . . . the most troublesome and effort-consuming.58
56 57 58
Buckle, History of Civilization in England, p. 122 Buckle, History of Civilization in England, p. 124. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Shogen [Preface], in FYZ, 1:53.
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The Abacus
It was neither Seiy jij (18661870) nor Gakumon no susume (18721876) nor Bunmeiron no gairyaku (1875), but this workChai no h (Methods of bookkeeping)that so consumed Fukuzawa from 1873 to 1874.59 The first publication to introduce Western double-entry bookkeeping into Japan, Chai no h reveals that the invocation of numbers, abaci, and calculation was more than a passing turn of rhetoric for Fukuzawa. The frontispiece to Chai no h (see fig. 1) provides readers with a powerful glimpse into the overarching themes of the book: a pencil and a ruler frame the right and left sides; and running down the length of each of these instruments is the phrase The tip of the pen allows us to rule the age, and with effort enriches the world. The layout of the page itself conveys a strong aesthetic of symmetry, with images of a scale and an abacus framing the top and bottom respectively. The two images are central to defining the innovative role of bookkeeping in Fukuzawas political thought. The rhetoric of the frontispiece, declaring that one rules the age with a pen, had deep meaning for Fukuzawa. As his own preface indicates, Chai no h was not simply an instruction manual, but also a bid to redraw the boundaries of proper knowledge. Over the course of several pages, Fukuzawa decried scholars (gakusha ) for their bias against the forms of learning practiced by commoners (hyakush chnin ).60 The following year, he would reiterate this point by scorning scholars as merely knowing difficult characters, reading difficult ancient texts, enjoying waka, and writing Chinese poetry.61 Thus the primary goal of Chai no h was to demonstrate to effete poets and recondite Confucians the necessity of bookkeepingpreviously ignored, but eminently useful.
59 For the most prolific discussion of Fukuzawa Yukichi from the perspective of the history of accounting, see Nishikawa Kjir , Fukuzawa Yukichi to boki , Kigy kaikei 5.6 ( June 1953): 75660; Nishikawa, Seiy boki dny-shi no kenky , Kaikei 115.4 (April 1979): 585601; Nishikawa, Fukuzawa Yukichi to shshi boki-h , Kaikei 66.6 (November 1954): 5769; Nishikawa, Nihon ni okeru seiy boki no fuky to kis-h , Kaikei 67.5 (May 1955): 99107. See also Nishikawa, Nihon boki shi dan (Dbunkan, 1971), pp. 21247; Nihon boki-gaku seisei-shi (Yshd, 1982), pp. 316. 60 Fukuzawa, Chai no h, in FYZ, 3:33335. 61 Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, 3:30.
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Fig. 1. Frontispiece to Fukuzawa Yukichi, Chai no h (1873), vol. 1. In FYZ, 3:332. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.
21
Although scholars often engage in high debate and speak of ruling all under heaven, they have no idea how even to pay off their own debts, Fukuzawa told his readers.62 The frontispiece therefore symbolized that the tip of the pen, and not abstruse philosophy, would rule the age, and with effort enrich the world. Chai no h proved troublesome and effort-consuming for Fukuzawa because even the most learned and Westernized scholars of his age were unfamiliar with bookkeeping. Even the ordinary economy textbooks of the Tokugawa period, which Tetsuo Najita described as must reading for [Tokugawa] merchants, provided no directions on bookkeeping, and historians of accounting practices agree that no known bookkeeping manual has yet been found for Tokugawa Japan.63 Thus it is safe to assume that knowledge of bookkeeping hardly circulated during Japans early modern period and that Fukuzawa had few, if any, native precedents upon which to build. Given these conditions, he chose to base Chai no h on an English-language primer for bookkeeping, rather than composing his own manual from scratch.64 Fukuzawa would later report in his autobiography that he first came across an older edition of the primer Bryant and Strattons Common School Book-keeping at some point during the 1850s. His initial encounter with this work was far from positive, and after a few pages he gave up reading it, complaining that the topic was opaque. At the time, he apparently did not keep any personal accounts and had rarely encountered Japanese account books (daifukuch ). Fukuzawa recalled the following childhood episode:
[My father] tried to give his children what he thought was an ideal education. The teacher lived in the compound of the lords storage office, but having some merchants children among his pupils, he naturally began to train them
Fukuzawa, Chai no h, 3:333. Tetsuo Najita, Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 30; Kees Camfferman and Terry E. Cooke, Dutch Accounting in Japan 16091850: Isolation or Observation? Accounting, Business and Financial History 11.3 (November 2001): 36982; Nishikawa Kjir, Nihon no kaikeishi: Hirado to Dejima kara , Kigy Kaikei 24.7 ( July 1972): 12933; Tszoku keizai bunko, 12 vols., ed. Nihon Keizai Ssho Kankkai (Nihon keizai ssho kankkai, 191617). 64 Henry B. Bryant, Bryant and Strattons Common School Book-keeping: Embracing Single and Double Entry. Containing Sixteen Complete Sets of Books, with Ample Exercises and Illustrations. For Primary Schools and Academies (1861; 7th ed., New York: Ivison, Phineey, Blakeman & Co., 1871).
62 63
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in numerals: Two times two is four, two times three is six, etc. . . . [W]hen my father heard this, he took his children away in fury. It is abominable, he exclaimed, that innocent children should be taught to use numbersthe tool of merchants. There is no telling what the teacher may do next.65
Most likely this recollection dates to the 1840s, but it was not until 1860 that Fukuzawa first wrote about bookkeeping proper, in his expanded Japanese edition of Ziqing s Hua Ying tongyu . Hua Ying tongyu was a collection of common English terms translated into Chinese and organized by general category, such as professions, clothing, metals, medicines, currency, things that move through the air, and things that move on the ground.66 Fukuzawa took Ziqings work and appended Japanese translations to it, republishing the new work in Japan. Book-keeping was among the many collected entries, and Fukuzawas edition featured the entry for bookkeeping shown in figure 2. The translation of sili shubu that appeared in the original Chinese edition67 comes rather close to an English meaningmanaging accounts. Fukuzawas Japanese translation, however, was kanj , which by his time had come to mean, broadly, to calculate, add up, or reckon. In specific usage, it could also have meant to pay or settle accounts in the sense of paying what one owed, as in settling up a bill or a tab.68 Almost another decade would pass before Fukuzawa would grapple seriously with the subject of bookkeeping. As his understanding of the matter grew more sophisticated, his language changed. This change may have in part stemmed from his involvement, circa 1869, in the affairs of the Yokohama-based Maruya Trading Company , an importer of Western goods and books.69 Known more famously today as the bookstore Maruzen , Maruya Trading started with the help of a one-thousand-yen investment by Fukuzawa, who later recommended his own students at Kei gijuku spend time working there to gain firsthand experience with commerce. Hayashi Yteki (18371901), founder of Maruya, was the ninety-fifth student to
Fukuzawa, Fuku jiden, 7:8; Fukuzawa, The Autobiography, p. 3. Ziqing, ed., Hua Ying tongyu, 2 vols. (China: 1860). 67 Ziqing, Hua Ying tongyu, 2.126b. 68 See entry for kanj in Nihon kokugo daijiten. 69 Norio Tamaki, Yukichi Fukuzawa, 18351901: The Spirit of Enterprise in Modern Japan (Hampshire, Eng.: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 99107.
65 66
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Fig. 2. Bookkeeping entry in Ziqing [ J. Shikei], Kaei tsgo, trans. and ed. Fukuzawa Shien [Yukichi] (Kei gijuku, 1860), p. 73b. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.
matriculate at Kei, and is credited as having composed his own work on bookkeeping called Seiy chai keiko hchi (1874). These connections to education point to Fukuzawas strong interest and emphasis on bookkeeping at the time. Many early Kei students went on to publish significant works on bookkeeping, including the first student ever to matriculate thereKobayashi Kotar (18481904), who translated two double-entry bookkeeping textbooks by C. C. Marsh in 1876. Even more significant are the careers of several other students: Takeda Hitoshi (1856/7?), who started a bookkeeping school (Takeda boki gakk ) in the Ginza district in 1879; Morishima Shtar (1848/91910), who wrote six works on accounting and was an instructor at Mitsubishi Commercial School ( ); and Morishita Iwakusu (18521917), who co-authored a number of Morishimas works and was also a Mitsubishi instructor.70 At the start of his engagement with the Maruya Trading Company, Fukuzawa had already complained about the lack of adequate bookkeeping instruction in Japan and the troubles it caused for those who wanted to start a proper business. When expressing this opinion, he used the term chai to denote bookkeeping.71 This term, however, did not yet stick, for in the summer of 1871, Fukuzawa wrote instead of shbai kaikei .72 At that time, kaikei, a neologism whose first attested usage had appeared in 1779, was roughly a synonym for kanj,
70 See Maruyama Makoto, Fukuzawa Yukichi monka (Nichigai Asoshitsu, 1995), pp. 1, 16, 37, 6364, 74. 71 Fukuzawa, Maruya shsha no ki , in FYZ, 19:22. 72 Fukuzawa, Keim tenarai no bun , in FYZ, 3:1819.
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and dictionaries cite the collocation kaikei kanj.73 Fukuzawas own sense of shbai kaikei probably also implied the idea of statistical surveying. In 1866, when Fukuzawa published the first volumes of Seiy jij, he had used kaikei to translate the act of Enumeration specified in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, mandating a national census.74 To carry out a quantitative survey, and to do so in a manner useful for the needs of business or commercethis was the way in which Fukuzawa conceived of bookkeeping prior to Chai no h. The overlapping meanings of enumeration and bookkeeping during this phase of Fukuzawas thinking connect bookkeeping back to the theme of statistics as an emergent discipline. Standard dictionaries note that by 1871, writers interested in the modern science of accounting had begun to use the term kaikei, but other sources reveal much terminological ambiguity.75 One example of such ambiguity is Keizai shgaku (1867), a pre-Meiji textbook on Western methods of political economy, which was a translation of the English-language textbook Outlines of Social Economy by William Ellis (18001881). In its introduction for Japanese readers outlining the state of academic knowledge in the West, Keizai shgaku divided academic knowledge into five principal disciplines, glossing each with a corresponding English term in katakana: Ethics (kyka ), Politics (seika ), Natural Sciences (rika ), Medicine (ika ), and Fine Arts (bunka ). It further parsed Politics, the parent category for political economy, into seven subdisciplines, namely, Civil Law (minp ), Commercial Law (shh ), Criminal Law (keih ), Constitutional Law (kokuh ), International Law (bankoku kh ), Statistics (kaikeigaku ), and political economy (keizaigaku ).76 In this textbook, kaikei meant neither accounting nor bookkeeping, but corresponded precisely to Buckles prime territory: the new discipline of statistics.
See entry for kaikei in Nihon kokugo daijiten. Compare: The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten years, in such a Manner as they shall by Law direct. Fukuzawa: . For Fukuzawas translation, see Fukuzawa, Seiy no jij, in FYZ, 1:333. 75 See kaikei in Nihon kokugo daijiten. 76 Kanda Khei , Preface, Keizai shgaku (Edo: Kanda-shi, Kei 3 [1867]), pp. 1V-1R.
73 74
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Fukuzawa was undoubtedly familiar with Keizai shgaku. The translator of the work and author of its introduction, Kanda Khei (18301898), had been an instructor at the bakufu-funded Center for Western Studies, the Kaiseijo , where Keizai shgaku was used as a textbook. By 1873 Kanda had become a key bureaucrat in the new Meiji regime and a member of the Meiji Six Society. In the pages of Meiroku zasshi, he published profusely on numerous topics related to currency reform and industrial policy, as well as an article concerning the role of music in nation-building.77 Fukuzawa would therefore have been aware of Kandas work on political economy and familiar with the use of the term kaikeigaku as statistics. This sense of kaikei as statistics is important because by 1873, Fukuzawa had deliberately chosen to discard it. In translating Bryant and Stratton, he preferred to employ the term chai rather than kaikei. Later in life, Fukuzawa clearly explicated his rationale, and indicated to readers why he had gone to great pains to select appropriate terms for this book in particular. Fukuzawa made every attempt to render the terms and concepts of bookkeeping in a way that would reflect actual merchant experience in Japan, rather than relying on abstruse terms imported from the West. He even personally carried out fieldwork in Japanese merchant houses, so as to understand [their] daily language .78 Through chai, Fukuzawa wished to invoke the intimate practice of real Japanese persons and their lived engagements. Fukuzawas shift from statistics as an objective science to chai as a subjective practice is vital to understanding his essay Numerical Equality. The difficulties Fukuzawa experienced in translating Bryant and Strattons textbook illustrate the exact nature of such subjective practice. Although choosing the correct term for bookkeeping was a significant dilemma for Fukuzawa, the main hurdle that he had to overcome was the numerical representation of money .79 Consider, first, the appearance of numbers in Fukuzawas 1868 Kinm kyri zukai , an elementary physics primer for children (see fig. 3). Here, the specific degrees along the thermometer are written in the Japanese that was still used in Fukuzawas time. In
77 For his articles, see MZ, 2:10514, 2:14953, 2:16365, 2:25255, 2:27376, 2:34549, 3:13945, 3:15865, 3:24045. In English, see Braisted, ed. and trans., Meiroku zasshi, pp. 21318, 23537, 24041, 28386, 29395, 32730, 40812, 41720, 45761. 78 Fukuzawa, Shogen, in FYZ, 1:53. 79 Fukuzawa, Shogen, 1:53.
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Fig. 3. Illustration depicting the various temperatures in Fahrenheit, including the boiling and freezing points of water, average temperatures for normal and feverish bodies, and average seasonal temperatures. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Kinm kyri zukai (1868), in FYZ, 1:10. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.
his introduction to Chai no h, however, and in the translators notes (yakushach ) in the main body of the text, Fukuzawa goes to lengths to explain the new system of notation. As is depicted in figure 4, although he retained kanji for the values 1 through 9, Fukuzawa introduced the arabic numeral zero into the writing of monetary amounts
27
Fig. 4. Explanation of numerical notation from Fukuzawa, Preface, Chai no h, in FYZ, 3:336-37. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.
in Chai no h. Using zero proved necessary insofar as Fukuzawa wished to write in decimal notation. Rather than adopting zero universally, however, he incorporated this decimal notation into a complex duality of numeric thinking. Thus, in figure 5, the bottom rows represented monetary values in decimal notation (10 yen, and 12 yen, 50 sen, respectively), but the top rows represented specific quantities of rice and barley, listed in standard Japanese notationthe system that runs A-man, B-sen, C-hyaku, D-j, et cetera. In short, money was recorded according to one semiotic order (zero-based decimal notation), whereas quantities of traded goods were recorded according to another. For Fukuzawa, the importance of decimal representation for monetary values lay primarily in the need to line up numerical figures on the page and add them up quickly.80 In contrast to the values on the
80
Fukuzawa, Shogen, 1:65.
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Fig. 5. Sample rice and wheat measures from Fukuzawa, Chai no h, in FYZ, 3:343. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.
thermometer, which required no mathematical operations, the monetary values of transactions had to be constantly re-tallied to render current sums. The importance of quick and accurate arithmetic must have been clear to Fukuzawa, for the original text of Common School Bookkeeping, the basis of Fukuzawas translation, contained an appendix, titled Proficiency in Mathematics, that focused on honing students skills at adding numbers on the page. The kind of proficiency most available to a Book-keeper, Bryant and Stratton wrote, is facility and accuracy in addition. The ability to add long columns of figures with speed and certainty is one of the very best claims a young man can present. . . . So highly is this accomplishment esteemed . . . that where it is wanting other qualifications sink into comparative insignificance.81 Bryant and Strattons text then provided examples of how to add columns of figures on paper by lining them up properly. This method of addition, where figures were aligned on the decimal, was impossible in the traditional style of Japanese notation used in Kinm kyri zukai, unless one were to be able to write out the non-expressed zeroes in such kanji as hyaku-man , j-man , man , and sen . For the
81
Bryant, Common School Book-keeping, p. 184.
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conception of bookkeeping that Fukuzawa intended to translate, some form of decimal notation was essential. Money, in particular, had to be represented in decimal columns, for the most basic purpose of the double-entry register was to produce a legible record by which one could easily check accounts for accuracy. In Fukuzawas time, double-entry bookkeeping was an inherently public system of accounting whose main function was not to calculate profit and loss, but to legitimize merchant activities. Wellordered books meant that a merchant was behaving in accord with the just and virtuous morals of society. As Mary Poovey has demonstrated, the precision and meticulousness of ones ledger, the extent of diligence and care applied, confirmed a merchant as an impartial and objective agent, a subscriber to an ethic of self-denial rather than an ethic of profit mongering.82 A well-kept ledger was not simply about facts, but also about norms. The key to double-entry bookkeepingthe thread linking numbers to moral virtuewas the concept of balance. Fukuzawa explained:
The term Double Entry, as distinctive from Single Entry, refers to the fact, that for every transaction, two or more entries are made in the Ledger. The condition of these entries is such that each transaction, when properly recorded, will produce on the Ledger equal debits and credits; that is, the same value that is carried to the debtor side of one or more accounts must also be carried over to the creditor side of one or more accounts, thus producing a perpetual equilibrium of debits and credits and affording a distinct test of the correctness of the work. The theory of equal debits and credits is the leading feature of Double Entry.83
The initial presumption of double-entry bookkeeping was that there should be symmetry in all transactions: whenever goods or services changed hands, one party became a debtor and the other a creditor. If A were to buy two yen worth of books from B, and five yen worth of books from C, A would be a debtor for seven yen, B would be a creditor
82 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 2938; Porter, Trust in Numbers, pp. 97105. For the older view that emphasizes profits and losses, see Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. and trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1:163; Basil S. Yamey, Scientific Bookkeeping and the Rise of Capitalism, The Economic History Review 1.2/3 (1949): 99113. 83 Fukuzawa, Chai no h, 3:465.
30 Hansun Hsiung
for two yen, and C would be a creditor for five yen. All three were to be recorded in ones own double-entry ledger. On a balance sheet, these credits and debits were placed parallel to one another and summed. By correctly recording a debt to the other party every time one gained a credit, and vice versa, one could ensure that the final sum of debits and credits in a ledger balancedin this case, seven yen of debits (A), and seven yen of credits (B + C). The illustration in figure 6, from Chai no h, a trial balance sheet, allows us to visualize this crux of double-entry bookkeeping. The sheet ends with the words byd fugwhich is Fukuzawas translation for equilibrium but literally means something like the unity or coming together of equals. Corresponding debits and credits for each account have been ordered on the page, and summed on both sides. This is where Fukuzawas notion of the abacus comes back into play. Fukuzawa saw no need for translating the appendix on addition in the original text, for he believed that Japanese readers would come to understand this new representational system of monetary values with little difficulty. He reasoned that numbers aligned on the decimal in a ledger was just the same as looking at the rows of an abacus ; over fifteen years later, when looking back at Chai no h for the first edition of his Collected Works, he would reiterate this analogy.84 We can use the frontispiece of Chai no h shown in figure 1 to illustrate Fukuzawas point. At the top of the chalkboard are arabic numerals in decimal notationthe year of publication, according to both the recently adopted Gregorian calendar and the restored imperial year1873/2533. Written out in cursive on a chalkboard, a new order of the page now becomes apparent: the pencil tip as well as the ruler connect the abacus at the bottom to the numbers inscribed at the top, all of which is dominated by the figure of the balance. The physical object of the abacus was first textualized into decimal notation, and in turn, the decimal notation was used specifically to facilitate quick summation to produce the balance of monetary values that stood at the core of double-entry bookkeeping.
84 Fukuzawa, Chai no h, 3:336, also 3:345. See also his reiteration of this point decades later in his introduction to his own collected works: Fukuzawa, Shogen, 1:65, where he said that because [writing in decimal notation] is just like the digits on a Japanese abacus, it will likely be easy for people to accept.
31
Fig. 6. Trial balance from Fukuzawa, Chai no h, in FYZ, 3:472. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.
What were the calculations on the abacus that grounded Fukuzawas argument for gender equality? In double-entry bookkeeping, numerical balance at the end of a ledger also represented the fairness, honesty, accuracy, and objectivity of the merchant. According to Mary Poovey, balances were equated to justice in European double-entry bookkeeping, because what they displayedthe identity of two numberscould be easily verified . . . simply by comparing the two numbers; double-entry bookkeeping thus constituted a system in relation to which one could judge right from wrong . . . [an] instrument that produced both truth and virtue.85
85
Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, p. 55.
32 Hansun Hsiung
In Fukuzawas system, however, the balanced account books that symbolized justice, truth, and virtue were replaced by the abacus as a normative symbol. In the frontispiece, it was the abacus that occupied the central role in the assemblage of linked instrumentspencil, ruler, writing surface, and scale. The abacus, moreover, was organized analogically to decimal notation, one of double-entry bookkeepings prime conditions of possibility. Calculations on the abacus, though they might seem condensed and encoded, operated as a partial standin for a larger discourse in which the fact of balance implied a whole host of virtuous norms. Through a series of associations in his chain of reasoning, Fukuzawa perceived the calculations of the abacus that were used for bookkeeping as the balance that set the norm of moral conduct. One might argue that in interweaving merchant practice with virtue, Fukuzawa more closely resembled the pre-Meiji Kaitokud thinkers than his own contemporaries in the gender equality debate. Yamagata Bant (17481821), Kusama Naokata (17531831), Nakai Riken (17321817), and other students of the Kaitokud had claimed that precise techniques of measurement and calculation developed by merchants laid the foundation for a unique kind of universal moral virtue different from the traditional five Confucian virtues.86 In his preface to Chai no h, Fukuzawa similarly exhorted scholars to augment their textual knowledge with the practical knowledge of merchants. Yet this set of thinkers illuminated by Najita might be connected to Fukuzawa and bookkeeping in another way, via the resemblance between their milieu and the eighteenth-century Scottish milieu that had such a strong impact on Fukuzawas early thought. Setting the stage, John Locke, in a widely read treatise on education, had advised all Gentlemen to learn perfectly Merchants Accompts, and not think it is a Skill, that belongs not to them, because it has . . . been chiefly practiced by Men of Traffick.87 His exhortation to bookkeeping came during a period when an interest in economic knowledge was exploding due to a growing realization that the fate of the English nationa concern that was then entering the consciousness of its citizenswas
86 Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokud Merchant Academy of Osaka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 87 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1693), p. 197.
33
inextricably bound with trade. Starting in the 1660s, a culture of commerce began to emerge in England, stimulating a sudden increase in the publication of political treatises relating to mercantilism, as well as didactic texts on merchant arts, skills, and techniques of reasoning. Through the circulation of these writings, previously disparate strands of thought relevant to economics coalesced into a consistent, identifiable discourse that attracted widespread public fascination and speculation. Now, the entire nation, not just the merchant, had to care about commerce, and learn the arts of men of Traffick.88 The best minds of the newly annexed Scotland turned their attention to the problem of national economic growth as a means to catch up with England proper. Dubbed the Scottish Ascendancy by historians of accounting, this period had a decisive impact on establishing bookkeeping as a formal subject of study.89 During the course of the eighteenth century, alongside the works of Hume, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson, there appeared textbooks on bookkeeping by Alexander Malcolm and John Mair. The latters Book-keeping Methodizd (1736) was repeatedly adapted by various editors up through 1853 and was the most-cited English-language bookkeeping text until the third quarter of the nineteenth century.90 Adam Smith himself owned a copy of Alexander Malcolms A New Treatise of Arithmetick and Bookkeeping (1718), and when the Physiological Library of the University of Edinburgh was founded in 1724 as a collection of the best Editions of Books, both ancient and modern, the curators saw fit to acquire a copy of Malcolms New Treatise among the 410 original volumes,
88 See Natasha Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce in England, 16601720 (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell Press, 1999); Arthur H. Cole, The Historical Development of Economic and Business Literature (Boston: Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1957); Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 16601720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 89 Basil S. Yamey, H. C. Edey, and Hugh W. Thompson, Accounting in England and Scotland: 15431800 (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1963), pp. 17073. More recently, M. J. Mepham, "The Scottish Enlightenment and the Development of Accounting," in Accounting History: Some British Contributions, ed. R. H. Parker and B. S. Yamey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 26891. 90 H.C. Bentley, A Brief Treatise on the Origin and Development of Accounting (Boston: Bentley School of Accounting and Finance, 1929), p. 14. On Mair as easily the most popular accounting text in the major American cities during the latter half of the eighteenth century, see T. K. Sheldahl, Americas Earliest Recorded Text in Accounting: Sarjeants 1789 Book, Accounting Historians Journal 12:2 (1985): 7. On translations of Mairs work into other European languages, see Mepham, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Development of Accounting, pp. 27273.
34 Hansun Hsiung
placing it next to John Lockes 1696 Several Papers relating to Money, Interest and Trade in their catalogue.91 Bookkeeping was thus part and parcel of the new disciplines of society and economy that characterized the Scottish Enlightenment, appearing, by the end of the century, in Edinburgh Magazines New Books column alongside Theology, Law, Medicine, Poetry, Novels, Politics, and Political Economy.92 Although the growing importance of merchant knowledge in matters of national concern influenced Fukuzawas thought, one must also bear in mind that the Numerical Equality article, written in 1875, deployed its arguments within an intellectual schema significantly different from that of Najitas Kaitokud or of eighteenth-century Scotland. Fukuzawas recourse to bookkeeping was less directly concerned with merchants than with the immediate problem of how to cope with new modes of numerical reasoning and their ramifications for politics. Specifically, he was confronting the discipline of statistics and the profound consequences that Henry Buckles theses might have in the realm of ethics. Bookkeeping, in other words, was a tortured yet nonetheless cogent synecdoche that allowed Fukuzawa to posit the need for balance and equality as a normative value while simultaneously keeping his distance from Buckles Laws of Nature. More than an inert statistic, bookkeeping was a human activity that implicated all responsible humans. The contrast between this latter view and Buckles notion of statistics is stark. Statistics had offered an argument that aggregate numerical regularities corresponded to inevitable truths about the worldtruths caused by forces outside of human control. In the case of gender equality, this meant that regardless of ones own personal actions, society would gradually move toward a state of equality between the sexes, reflecting the necessity of statistical truth. That
91 See A Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith, Author of the Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, 2nd ed., comp. James Bonar and the Royal Economic Society (London: Macmillan and Co., 1932), p. 111. On the Physiological Library, see University of Edinburgh Physiological Library, The physiological library: begun by Mr. Steuart, and some of the students in natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, April 2. 1724: and augmented by some gentlemen; and the students of natural philosophy, December 1724 (Edinburgh: 1725), p. 3. 92 Books and Pamphlets Published in April 1796, Edinburgh Magazine (May 1796): 37980; Books and Pamphlets Published in May 1796, Edinburgh Magazine ( June 1796): 45960; Books and Pamphlets Published in London February 1797, Edinburgh Magazine (March 1797): 20911.
35
is, there was no compelling incentive for action in statistical thought. Thus in the Numerical Equality essay, Fukuzawa moved away from this argument, signaling his discontent with the moral passivity of statistical thinking. He may have trusted numbers, but he did not trust them as a sufficient ground for moral action. He had to find support for gender equality in an ethical element that was related specifically to the common imperatives of everyday human conduct. That Fukuzawa saw bookkeeping as more useful than statistics is evident from the manner in which he sought to instill principles of bookkeeping into his own students. In 1871, Fukuzawa listed bookkeeping as a subbranch of mathematics (sgaku ), thereby placing it under the rubric of number and science (s and ri), which he believed was at the core of all forms of knowing.93 More telling is the placement of bookkeeping within the Kei curriculum, over which Fukuzawa, as founder and president of the university, exercised final control. According to a course guide from 1879, Kei offered three progressive levels of matriculation: three preparatory semesters for minors, four preparatory semesters for adults, and, finally, the main course of instruction (honka ). In the area of mathematics, the first level offered only two semesters on arithmetic, and the second level advanced to elementary algebra. During the main course of instruction, students proceeded on to geometry and trigonometry during their second and third semesters, respectively; then, in the final two semesters before graduation from Kei, they learned bookkeeping (bokih ), which was the crowning achievement and endpoint of their mathematical education.94 Indeed, bookkeeping was a kind of final lesson in life itself. Elsewhere, Fukuzawa had likened life to a business (shbai ) and suggested that one keep rigorous accounts of his actions in the realm of knowledge and virtue, so as not to suffer any losses .95 And if this held for life conduct in general, certainly it held for specific choices regarding such matters as marriage, concubinage, and prostitution. Oppositesex relations, as a subcategory of the business of life, should also be
Fukuzawa, Keim tenarai no bun, 3:1819. Kei gijukusha ch no yakusoku (Kei gijuku shuppan, 1879), pp. 59. 95 Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, 3:118.
93 94
36 Hansun Hsiung
conducted along the principle of bookkeeping. Paraphrasing Fukuzawa, one could say to all philanderers, polygamists, and lechers: keep your affairs balanced.
A Tale of Enlightenment
Yet in the end, this article is a tale of Enlightenment. Only here, Enlightenment concerns the transformation of the elements and relations that comprise the field of legitimate knowledge at any given time or place, rather than any substantive ideologythat is, a set of propositions about civilization, human progress, or the liberation of men (and women) from self-incurred immaturity. Borrowing from Robert Darntons analysis of the French instance, Enlightenment lies most of all in a shifting [of] the epistemological ground, rearranging categories and realigning borders.96 The problem of Enlightenment, then, is threefold: first, it is a question of what hierarchies and structures took precedence in the diverse terrain of knowledge during early Meiji; next, it is a question of how various proficiencies, disciplines, and techniques were organized as areas of proper intellectual inquiry; and, finally, it is a question of what rules governed the set of possible operations when attempting to relate these various areas to one another. It remains to be explained why thinking about bookkeeping should have arisen at all as a viable referent in Fukuzawas argument. What does it mean when the debate about gender equality, which was so pivotal for Meiji society, suddenly changes into an argument about numbers and bookkeeping? What is implied by the fact that Fukuzawa thought it entirely appropriate to use bookkeeping as a moral metaphor in the pages of Meiroku zasshi? Even if a reconstruction of Fukuzawas argument proves capable of explicating bookkeepings meaning within the Numerical Equality article, it comes up short when held up against the external world in which Fukuzawa lived. There is no self-evident reason why, in the late nineteenth century, the relation between bookkeeping and political thought would have made sense for average readers. In the British world upon which Fukuzawa drew, the
96 Robert Darnton, Epistemological Angst: From Encyclopedism to Advertising, in The Structure of Knowledge: Classifications of Science and Learning Since the Renaissance, ed. Tore Frngsmyr (Berkeley: Office for the History of Science and Technology, University of California, 2001), p. 64.
37
topic of bookkeeping was rapidly disappearing from serious intellectual discourse, downgraded as a separate professional activity that was distinguished from presumably more theoretical higher learning the better-established disciplines and academically respectable sciences.97 As bookkeeping in the West became mere bookkeeping, the argument that it was as important as economics, political science, or sociology clashed like a grand lse majest against the sovereign epistemological order.98 Bookkeeping could be explained away with the kinds of strategies employed by Sekiguchi Sumiko and Albert Craig in treating Fukuzawas Numerical Equality essay: as an evasion, or minor footnote, or, finally, a tongue-in-cheek play. In the context of nineteenth-century European intellectual history, bookkeeping and political philosophy should not have occurred side-by-side at a time characterized by the disavowal of political economys relation . . . to accounting.99 And yet in early Meiji Japan, amidst efforts to Westernize politics and political philosophy, they did occur side-by-side. Fukuzawas refiguration of equal rights into a matter of equal numbers through bookkeeping therefore presents two possibilities: that an abacus and gender equality can occur in the same sentence with utter seriousness; or that the prevailing conditions of the early Meiji period, patrolling and structuring the relations between different bodies of knowledge, could allow for the destabilization of the disciplinary hierarchies that accompanied the Western concepts entering Japan. These two phenomena reveal a series of moments when John Stuart Mill stood shoulder-to-shoulder alongside the forgotten names of Bryant and Stratton, and bookkeeping stood alongside political philosophy. More than a classic tale of Mori and Herbert Spencer, or a tale of the conflict of liberalism with conservatism, the story of Japanese Enlightenment demonstrates how knowledge in the early Meiji period experienced a porousness and instability across boundaries of intellectual and non-intellectual endeavors. It was this porousness that allowed for a serious intellectual like Fukuzawa to make a serious argument about gender through the seemingly trivial subject of bookkeeping. Specifically, the difficulty of Fukuzawas argument about the abacus and gender equality is an example of how hierarchies, such as
97 98 99
Porter, Trust in Numbers, pp. 9193, 103. Porter, Trust in Numbers, p. 50; Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, p. 29. Porter, Trust in Numbers, p. 31; see also pp. 65, 36667 n. 67.
38 Hansun Hsiung
applied and pure, and vocational and theoretical, obscure the way in which bookkeeping could penetrate political philosophical discourse. To understand one of the most significant debates of the Meiji period, we must abandon these hierarchical distinctions, and allow abacus, pen, ruler, and ledger to stand alongside abstract rights. In recognizing the destabilization of these hierarchies, it is important not to reconstitute another set of hierarchies that would also preclude a more sympathetic view of the porousness of knowledge during this period. Chai no h offers a code for deciphering the argument in the Numerical Equality essay, but neither the abacus nor bookkeeping can be considered master tropes guiding Fukuzawas entire oeuvre. Previous scholars are more than correct to highlight other streams of Fukuzawas thoughtfor instance, ideas of civilization inherited from Scottish textbooks on political economy, or his lifelong struggle against Confucianism. Scholars are also right in pointing out that Fukuzawas gender views changed over time, as in the case of prostitution.100 Instead of substituting bookkeeping as a single master trope for understanding Fukuzawa, it is more accurate to view bookkeeping as one of many vital areas of Fukuzawas interest. Bookkeeping occurred simultaneously with other discourses without claiming primacy; Bryant and Stratton never replaced John Stuart Mill. The vital insight is, rather, that names as unknown and unexpected as Bryant and Stratton were a part of Fukuzawas political thought at all, standing alongside the better-known names of philosophical giants. Such alongsidedness can be documented quite literally. In Keis early years, mandatory mathematics courses culminated in lectures on bookkeeping in the final two semesters, demonstrating that in the overall curriculum, high politics and bookkeeping occupied not only the same page of Fukuzawas prospectus for Kei, but also the same time of studyas shown in Table 1. Within a single day, Kei students moved from hearing lectures on John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer to acquiring skills in double-entry bookkeeping. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Fukuzawa, the master behind this curriculum, performed the same movement in his own thought. Confirming this is a marginal note Fukuzawa made in his personal copy of Mills Utilitarianism, a note that reveals how Fukuzawa used a metaphor of
100
Sekiguchi, Go-isshin to jendaa, pp. 27177.

Table 1. Primary Curriculum Years 4 and 5 at Kei gijuku (1879) Year 4 Subjects
Logic J. S. Mill: Considerations on Representative Government Herbert Spencer: Social Statics Bookkeeping
39
Year 5 Subjects
J. S. Mill: On Liberty Herbert Spencer: The Study of Sociology Sheldon Amos: The Science of Law Bookkeeping
Adapted from Kei gijukusha ch no yakusoku, p. 9.
balanced economic transaction to illustrate Mills concept of retributive justice.101 In this section, Mill had attempted to harmonize retributive justice and preventative justice along with a new sociological claim that crime results from social forces rather than any individual ill will.102 In the margins, Fukuzawa rejected both preventative justice and the sociological claim. Where Mill observed that no rule on the subject [of punishment] recommends itself so strongly to the primitive and spontaneous sentiment of justice, as lex talionis, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Fukuzawa wrote: The purpose of punishment . . . is to compensate for the damages of that crime. He then continued, We compensate for borrowed money by adding interest, and for borrowed time by paying wages. Shouldering these natural consequences [nachuraru konsekuensu ] is sufficient grounds for justice.103 On the one hand, this is certainly a theoretical argument about political philosophy and its notion of justice. On the other hand, it again reveals Fukuzawas characteristic interest in economic balance as fact and norman interest that settles in alongside Mills claims, coexisting with and reinforcing them without overwhelming them. Just as Fukuzawa associated the abacus
101 For a general outline of Fukuzawas encounter with Mill, see Koizumi Takashi , J. S. Miru, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nishi Amane no kri genri tekiy h J. S. , in Nishi Amane to Nihon no kindai , ed. Shimane Kenritsu Daigaku Nishi Amane Kenkykai (Perikansha, 2005), pp. 45156. See also Anzai Toshimitsu , Fukuzawa Yukichi to J. S. Miru Fujin no reij J.S. in Kindai Nihon to Igirisu , shis , ed. Sugihara Shir (Nihon keizai hyron sha, 1995), pp. 102 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 4th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1871), p. 85. 103 Anzai Toshimitsu, Fukuzawa Yukichi no seigikan: J. S. Miru Kri shugi dai-go-sh o megutte J.S. , Fukuzawa Yukichi nenkan 19 (December 1992), quoted on p. 243.
3157.
40 Hansun Hsiung
with Laws of Nature in his Numerical Equality essay, here he associated balanced economic transactions with nature, claiming that such transactions were examples of natural consequence. Crime and punishment should balance out one another in the same way that wages should be commensurate with labor, and interest with the length of a loan. Once more, balance in finances is the normative basis for a political discussion that seems to have nothing to do with balanced finances. Like Christopher Hill, I choose to describe the Meiji Enlightenment as a period of epistemological rupture. I think of early Meiji as a chaotic period of resettlement: the instabilities caused by this rupture allowed for uneven and unexpected connections between seemingly disparate fields of knowledge.104 Although the rupture itself was new, the increased flow of ideas that accompanied it in many ways intensified a preexisting educational syncretism that is best expressed in the popular term peripatetic study (ygaku ); this was a prominent feature of learning in the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas specific private academies often specialized in Chinese, Dutch, Kokugaku, or military subject matters, the scholars themselves were highly mobile; traveling freely from school to school, they became multidisciplinary intellectuals.105 Fukuzawa himself was an example of this educational experience; moving from Nakatsu to Nagasaki and then to Osaka, he became trained in military arts and the natural sciencesall before reaching Yokohama and embarking upon his full-scale study of the West. Yet, although Japans opening to the West at first only further encouraged this expansive learning, its possibilities were ultimately foreclosed by the political imperatives of the Meiji state. According to Maruyama Masao, who cites the Meiji Six Society as evidence, Meiji intellectual culture up until the late 1880s was one of considerable intercourse among thinkers of a wide variety of political leanings and disciplines, producing an environment where academics and artists were neighbors. Moreover, the ferment of the Freedom and Peoples Rights Movement (jiy minken und ) proved that average persons who showed interest, could, regardless of their formal edu104 Christopher L. Hill, National History and the World of Nations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 32. 105 Richard Rubinger, Private Academies of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 21323.
41
cation, enter into associations to debate high political philosophy. This fluid and open atmosphere was changed by the formation of Japans imperial universities in 1886. In Maruyamas analysis, the modern Japanese university, which was designed in particular for the education of a service elite within public and private sectors, gave rise to highly specialized university departments and disciplinary sectionalism. It was against the etymological meaning of the word universit, explains Maruyama, [that modern Japanese universities] imported Western knowledge piecemeal based on disciplinary specialty.106 Elsewhere, Maruyama refers to this pattern of compartmentalized knowledge by comparing it to octopus pots (takotsubo ), with each pot separated from the others.107 At the same time, the qualifications for obtaining intellectual status increasingly came to be based upon an appropriate educational pedigree at specific universities. Overall, the changes in Keis educational system fit Maruyamas thesis. Up through 1885, bookkeeping was still taught as part of the primary curriculum at Kei University, alongside Franois Guizots (17871874) History of Civilization in Europe.108 After the primary curriculum was divided into four separate tracks based on concentrationliterature, economics, law, and politicsbookkeeping became a required second-year course for economics majors.109 In 1911, it was eliminated completely, replaced by courses on social problems, industrial policy, monetary theory, and banking.110 Bookkeeping, which was once a subject that students studied as they read Mill, ceased to play an important role in higher education overall. Other Meiji works further support the porousness between disparate forms of knowledge, demonstrating that it also occurred in fields beyond bookkeeping. Nishi Amanes Renga sekiz no setsu (Essay on brick construction) argued that the strength of popular rights can be measured by the strength of buildings. Japanese buildings
106 Maruyama Masao, Kindai Nihon no chishikijin , in Maruyama Masao sh (Iwanami, 1996), 10:23839, 24445. 107 Maruyama Masao, Nihon no shis (Iwanami, 1961), pp. 12932. 108 Oda Katsutar , ed., Tky sho-gakk gakusoku ichiran (Eirand, 1883), pp. 46567; Shimomura Yasuhiro , ed., Tky rygaku hitori annai (Shinyd, 1885), pp. 8688. 109 Kei gijuku , ed., Kei gijuku ichiran , 2nd ed. (Kei gijuku, 1899), p. [2]. 110 Kei gijuku, ed., Kei gijuku sran (Kei gijuku, 1911), p. 19.
42 Hansun Hsiung
do not compare in strength and firmness with those of Europe, Nishi wrote, positing that just as uprightness is the nature of bricks, so protecting human rights is the nature of man.111 Again in the pages of Meiroku zasshi, we find an article by Tsuda Shind that appears to be a scientific explanation of earthquakes. Closer reading reveals, however, that it is simultaneously an argument about war, one that uses earthquakes to ask whether the large profit arising from the employment of soldiers by the nation can be likened to the Creators achievement in forming the world through the use of earthquakes.112 Here, modern seismological knowledge overlapped with political theses that reflected the lingering aftermath of the 1873 debate over the invasion of Korea. In early Meiji, the theoretical and practicaland sometimes simply bizarrecohabited in the same space and were combined by thinkers like Nishi, Tsuda, and Fukuzawa without the imperatives of disciplinary subordination that would differentiate them decades later. To take seriously these moments when expected structures seem confounded is to explore how seemingly familiar political concepts can be articulated in seemingly strange and foreign ways. This strangeness, in turn, forces us to reflect upon how our own hierarchies of proper or legitimate knowledge preclude possibilities that once viably existed for Meiji thinkers. Without going so far as to accept that an abacus explains all of Fukuzawas views on gender equality, it is nonetheless clear that norms of balance derived from bookkeeping played a key role in Fukuzawas political thought, coexisting simultaneously with a traditional canon of political philosophy represented by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Taking seriously bodies of knowledge typically excluded from the canon of respected disciplinesbodies of knowledge such as bookkeepingmakes room for new interpretations of Meiji texts. It allows for the writing of a Meiji intellectual history wherein the boundary of what is intellectual itself becomes the object of inquiry.
111 Nishi Amane , Renga sekiz no setsu , Meiroku zasshi 4 (undated), in MZ, 1:163. 112 Tsuda Shind, Jishin no setsu , Meiroku zasshi 17 (September 1874), in MZ, 2:119.

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Woman, Man, Abacus:

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

. Substituting the word numbers for rights, Fukuzawa

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

. Intimations of this view date back at least to a letter

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa, Shogen, 1:65.

Bryant, Common School Book-keeping, p. 184.

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, p. 55.

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Sekiguchi, Go-isshin to jendaa, pp. 27177.

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

Adapted from Kei gijukusha ch no yakusoku, p. 9.

Fukuzawa and Numerical Equality

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