1. 国際経済法学専攻トップ
2. 研究・ワークショップ
3. 横浜法学会 研究会 成果報告

日時	2014年6月16日（月）12：10～12：50
場所	法学研究棟201号室 （横国大HPアクセスガイドよりキャンパスマップN4-5参照）
講師	Mohammad Shahabuddin　客員研究員 （横浜国立大学大学院国際社会科学研究院）
題目	Asian Approach to International Law from a Historical Perspective 講義は英語で行われます

 

‘National-Spirit’ (Kokutai) as a Response to Imperialism: The Japanese ‘Model’ of the 19th Century

Being a part of a broader project that looks into how 19th century nationalist discourses shaped international law in the centre as well as the periphery/semi-periphery, this paper is an attempt to trace the unique features of the national-spirit (nationalism) discourse in 19th century Japan and repercussions of such discourse for contemporary international legal thoughts. To this end, in this paper I study the works of two iconic figures of 19th century Japan – Seishisai (Yasushi) AIZAWA, a Japanese Confucian scholar and Yukichi FUKUZAWA, a Meiji architect of modernisation, who never ceased to be relevant in the Japanese discourse on the ‘nation’

While their takes on reinventing Japan’s national-spirit (kokutai) vary, what remains significant for this research is their shared urge to save Japan from Western imperial interventions; both the scholars sought the solution in nationalism to mitigate this imperial threat on Japan’s sovereignty and ultimately to save Japan from colonization. It is against this backdrop that Aizawa’s urge for a state-religion or Fukuzawa’s advocacy for learning the essence of western civilization as the basis of Japanese kokutai should be contextualized as an instrumental preference. This framework also explains the way Japan adopted imperialism itself as a self-defense strategy, and understood this as a requirement for civilization – this time with racial underpinning – during the interwar period.

This paper attempts to examine this phenomenon of Japanese nationalism in the 19th century and explore the manner in which Japanese perception of international law got shaped in the process, and also, how international law itself then served as a language of imperialism for Japan. (Mohammad Shahabuddin)