【文明開化と人云ふけれど　野蛮開発と僕は呼びます】What They Called the Dawn of Civilization, I Call the Development of Barbarism

【文明開化と人云ふけれど　野蛮開発と僕は呼びます】

What they called the dawn of civilization, I call the development of barbarism

The poet Nakahara Chuya (1907–1937) lived through unsettled times and died at the age of thirty. The words above are from an unpublished work composed at the end of November 1934.

What Nakahara refers to as [文明開化] (Bunmei Kaika, "the dawn of civilization") is a term that has been used within the Japanese context. In the broadest sense it denotes the phenomenon by which Japan, after the establishment of the new Meiji government in 1868, rapidly adopted Western civilization and culture and Westernized its social life and institutions. The term itself gained wide currency as a translation of the word "civilization," introduced by Fukuzawa Yukichi, founder of what is now Keio University. Its influence drove sudden and dramatic change, centered above all in the cities.

This term has historically been glamorized from the perspective that the Meiji government achieved rapid modernization in order to compete with the Western powers. It was an era in which the Edo period was dismissed wholesale as feudalism without serious study, in which the Confucian traditions that had been Japanized and nurtured during the Edo period were denounced as antiquated teachings, and in which Western ideas such as liberalism and individualism were exalted in their place. Under this influence the dawn of civilization became the defining term of the Meiji era. It served as a convenient device for negating the Edo period that preceded it, and it became the force that turned Japan's gaze, which for more than a thousand years had been directed toward China, toward the West.

In truth, this shift continues to this day. It is not an exaggeration but a statement of fact that Japan still arbitrarily treats its neighboring countries as enemies while leaning heavily toward the West. The prime ministers of Japan are a case in point. They confront the Chinese leadership with hard expressions and open hostility while deferring noticeably to Western leaders. The mass media takes a harsh tone toward China and Korea but never turns the same gaze on the West.

What exactly is this?

Why is this base and juvenile attitude the only one available?

If this is the result of the dawn of civilization, then as a young poet perceived nearly a century ago, the dawn of civilization was a brazen lie, and we must acknowledge this fully. If that is the case, it was not, as has long been affirmed, a symbol of civilization flowering. It was, as Nakahara Chuya put it, the development of barbarism.

And now it seems to me that every human being must think seriously about these words. Even if the initial reflections are full of pretense and fine-sounding platitudes, the reality is that this has become a question no one can any longer avoid. If a person will not confront this question thoroughly as a matter of their own inner reckoning, then no matter who they are, they risk becoming an affirmer of slaughter. I mean this in the sense of the slaughter that is to come.

Because we in the advanced nations, who have posed as people of advanced civilization, have acquired countless methods of making our appearances and manners look civilized. But when the lid is finally lifted, it turns out we were nothing but swindlers. Swindlers are always cunning. They are skilled at defrauding the very concept of the human.

In reality, the dawn of civilization inevitably drives the people of a given country into decadence and selfishness. The truth of the dawn of civilization is that it is an external force that develops the barbarism latent in human beings. It is the direct cause by which people who once knew how to live with enough are cast instantly into hell.

The perpetual upward progress of humanity is an impossibility.

If it were real, then every person born and raised in an advanced nation would have to be able to declare without a shadow of doubt that the human beings of this present era are the most ethical, the most rational, and the most capable of caring for others.

The truth is the exact opposite.