The Study on the introduction process of the concepts of the western social sciences in Japan : Review of the traslations in the Meiji era

本研究的目的是考察明治时代出版的西方社会科学文献的日文译本，并分析当时的日本人是如何理解西方社会和西方社会科学的概念的。我们的主要发现如下。密尔在《论自由与对代议制政府的思考》中论述的“官僚主义”经常被误译。也就是说，日本译者经常把密尔所说的行政官僚的罪恶，解释为少数有影响力的人能够控制官僚体系的暴政的罪恶。可能是由于明治初期行政官僚体制的不成熟和日本传统对中国经典教育的重视造成了误译现象。2、对于明治初期的大多数日本人来说，美利坚合众国的联邦制与欧洲民族国家的宪法差异是不够容易理解的。典型的例子是1880年由龙留·希杜卡翻译的托克维尔的《美国的民主》。Hiduka将“民主”和“共和”翻译成同一个词“kyouwa”（在日语中相当于“共和”）。当时的日本人对美国民主的本质只有肤浅的认识。

The purpose of this study is to exmine the Japanese traslations, which were published in the Meiji era, of the western literatures on social sciences, and to analyze how Japanese people in those days understood the western societies and the concepts of the western social sciences. Our main findings are as follows.1, "Bureaucracy" which J.S.Mill treated in On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government was frequently mistranslated. That is, the Japanese translators often interpreted the sentences, where Mill talked about the evils of the administrative bureaucy as a whole, as the evils of tyranny of few influential persons who could control the bureaucratic system. Probably, the mistranslations were brought about by the premature state of the early Meiji administrative bureaucrcy and the Japanese tradition which had attached the education of Chinese classics.2, For the most Japanese in the early Meiji period, the constitutional difference between the federal system of the United States of America and the European nation-states was not inteligible enough. The typical example was found in the translation of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, made by Ryuu Hiduka in 1880. Hiduka translated both "democracy" and "republic" into a same word, "kyouwa" (a Japanese equivalent for "republic"). The Japanese people at that time had only a superficial understanding of the essence of the American Democracy.