A study of the thought about 'Sintic civilization and barbarism' in Japan in the 18th century

在最近对日本思想史的研究中，民族国家理论作为一种方法论视角备受关注。这种观点倾向于将整个现代学术视为一种以“民族化”为目的而构建的意识形态机器，并对单一民族史学（一种与民族起源叙事密切相关的文化手段）采取尖锐的批判态度。然而，让我们意识到在日本列岛内部，直到德川时期，对日本固有历史的叙述基本上是不存在的，这种叙述将日本国家视为不言而喻的东西。从德川思想史的领域来看，儒家学者和德川日本的其他知识分子最明显缺乏的概念是日本独特性的概念。当然，由于17世纪中国从明朝到清朝的重大转变，“自我”的概念开始与围绕“（中国）文明”和“野蛮”区分的结构性波动有关，例如山崎安塞学派。然而，这也是一场以存在于中国文明范围内的普遍文明为前提的优越感或劣等感的辩论，它不涉及本土性（koyusei）问题，更不涉及排他性的特殊性问题。在我个人看来，本土意识或独特性意识（tokushusei）开始于与西方帝国的接触，这种接触推动了中国文明领域的最终解体，具体地说，它的雏形出现在像国学（Kokugaku）和水户学（Mito Learning）这样的幕松学派的外国意识中。

In recent research on the history of Japanese thought, the theory of the nation-state has been much in the limelight as a methodological perspective. This perspective tends to regard the entirety of modern scholarship as an ideological apparatus constructed for the purpose of "nationalization," and takes a sharply critical attitude particularly toward single-nation historiography, a cultural device that has been closely linked to the narration of the origin of the nation. Nevertheless, it is a good thing for us to be made aware that within the Japanese archipelago, until the Tokugawa period, the narration of an inherent history of Japan that treated the Japanese state as something self-evident basically did not exist To speak from the field of Tokugawa intellectual history, the conception that was most clearly lacking among Confucian scholars and other intellectuals in Tokugawa Japan was the idea of the peculiarity of Japan. Of course, as a result of the momentous changeover from the Ming to the Qing dynasties in China in the 17^<th> century, there was the beginning of a conception of "oneself" in connection with structural fluctuations surrounding the distinction between "[Sinitic] civilization" and "barbarism" in, for instance, the Yamazaki Ansai school. Nevertheless, this also was a debate about superiority or inferiority premised on a universal civilization existing within the sphere of Chinese civilization, and it was not concerned with the problem of indigenousness (koyusei), let alone an exclusivistic particularity. In my personal opinion, the consciousness of indigenousness or peculiarity (tokushusei) began as a result of the encounter with the Western empires, an encounter that propelled the final disintegration of the Chinese civilization sphere, and concretely speaking its embryonic form arose in the foreign consciousness of bakumatsu schools of thought such as National Learning (Kokugaku) and Mito Learning.