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http://news.bmn.com/hmsbeagle/81/xcursion/essay
from Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and
Time (pp. 232-235)
by Scott L. Montgomery
©2000. The University of Chicago Press. Used with permission.
Posted June 23, 2000 Issue 81
[Editor's note: It would be difficult to overstate the impact on science
and civilization that results from the sharing of knowledge between one
culture and another. As Scott L. Montgomery points out in this innovative
work, "Placing the knowledge of one people into the hands of another
involves the transfer of certain powers. . ." So the shaping, or
distortion, that knowledge undergoes in the course of translation is of
critical importance. And as Montgomery also tells us, the journey across
borders is fraught with complexities: ". . . translation defines a
process of communication every bit as varied as writing itself, and no
less central to what we commonly call 'civilization'. . . ." Science in
Translation examines the multitude of roles that translation has played
in the development of Western science from antiquity to the present, and
gives a fresh perspective to our consideration of what may be lost or
gained in that exercise.
Here Montgomery describes the introduction in the late nineteenth century
of Darwin's theories to Japan, in part through the teachings of oyatoi,
or foreign teachers. Western knowledge was embraced by the Japanese at
this time in the context of a nationalism that sought to "[advance] the
internal strength of the country by incorporating the best that other
nations could provide." - Ross T. Smart]
Darwin, "Evolution," and "Survival"
We mentioned earlier that few of the oyatoi ever lectured or wrote in
Japanese. Linguistically, on a professional level, they were never
allowed to "leave home." In the case of the American zoologist, Edward
Morse, his writings were handled by one of his more gifted students,
Ishikawa Chiyomatsu, who in 1883 helped fully introduce Darwin to Japan
by collecting a series of Morse's lectures into a book he titled Dbutsu
Shinka-ron, "Theory on the Evolution of Animals" (figure 1; see Watanabe
1990). The term for "evolution," shinka, Ishikawa either coined himself
or adopted from one of several earlier works published in the 1870s on
Darwinian ideas, most notably Izawa Shuji's 1879 translation of Thomas
Huxley's Lectures on the Origin of Species (1862). In either case, it did
not exist in Japanese scientific discourse before the 1870s.
It was, however, an excellent choice: comprising the characters for
"advancement" and "change," it had come to enjoy a wide currency outside
science prior to its adoption there, denoting "progress" as the idea of
the "forward movement of society toward civilization," especially under
the auspices of Western science. It was a term that could be said to have
embodied two sensibilities at once: Darwin's own Victorian view of
evolution as a process of continual improvement and, more immediately,
the ideology of the Japanese Enlightenment, with its call to a civilizing
nationalism. The political side to Darwinian language, therefore, was
aptly retained, to serve the purposes of Japanese self-imagery.
Interestingly enough, however, such nationalism helped dictate that
Darwin's own texts would be among the last works to be translated in this
area. Darwin himself, as an author, would be the last to speak for his
own ideas in Japan. Instead, it was Herbert Spencer, missionary of social
Darwinism, who came to be adopted as the apostle of evolution theory.
Indeed, by the time the first translation of Origin of Species appeared
in 1889, at least twenty renditions of Spencer's work were already in
circulation. Moreover, Darwin's book was translated not by a biologist,
geologist, or natural historian, but instead by a literary scholar,
Tachibana Sensaburo (see figure 1). Before this, only four works on the
actual science of evolutionary theory had been published, two from books
by Huxley. Even within scientific circles, the little of Darwin that did
get through during this period was doubly "translated," being imported
through the writings of his own English interpreters. Finally, even in
Ishikawa's rendering of Morse's lectures, Dbutsu Shinkaron, there is a
continual tendency throughout to take examples from the animal and plant
kingdoms and apply them to human situations (Watanabe 1990).[1]
Spencer had been introduced to Japan through American contacts. If Morse
was perhaps the more important of these, another was the famous
philosopher, art critic, and oriental scholar Ernest Fenellosa, one of
the very few oyatoi who did write and publish in Japanese. Japanese
authors, meanwhile, took up Spencerian ideas and disseminated them
broadly in copious writings, at times with government support. During the
1880s and 1890s, as the intellectual atmosphere of Japan grew
increasingly conservative and nationalistic, many thinkers, officials,
and students found themselves drawn to the concept of a struggle between
nations, with "higher" species eventually winning out over "lower" ones
(Nagazumi 1983). Indeed, the theory had no small attraction for those who
argued against further Westernization. Before 1900, the theory of
evolution tended to operate politically both within and outside of
science.
Before the century was out the language of evolution took on a more
striking cast. Terms such as shinka reflect the era of their origin, the
early Meiji period of hope and "progress." But by the late 1880s and
early 1890s, the pitch of nationalism had shifted to more reactionary
concerns about national moral standards, loyalty among the people, and at
the same time, about national destiny in terms of empire (teikoku).
Western nations were being viewed more in oppositional terms, again as
colonial aggressors, and as destructive models for Japanese character and
virtue. There was a strong resurgence of Confucian ethics, especially
evident for example in the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), which
linked "virtue" directly with such things as obedience to authority,
national sacrifice, and belief in the emperor's divine status. In this
atmosphere, Spencer himself was translated in sometimes hyper-Spencerian
terms. Kato Hiroyuki, in his Jinken Shinsetsu (New Doctrine of Human
Rights, 1882), provides one of the best and, at the time, most
influential examples. Not satisfied with a literal rendering of Darwin's
famous phrase, "survival of the fittest," so central to Spencer's own
philosophy, Kato felt compelled to evoke more of what he perceived to be
its deeper significance, and wrote it thus: ysh reppai - "victory of the
superior and defeat of the inferior." This, he asserted, was "the law of
heaven," governing the world of plants and animals as well as that of
human beings and the cultures they build (see Watanabe 1990, 71-74). For
a brief time, Kato's "victory of the superior. . ." was actually adopted
into biological discourse. Though largely abandoned before the second
decade of the twentieth century, replaced by a much milder alternative,
tekisha seizon ("survival of the most suitable"), Kato's phrase was
nonetheless revived during the era of rising militarism in the 1920s and
1930s, when eugenics came to Japan. Today, it is no longer used on any
sort of regular basis and has been veritably driven from the language of
evolutionary biology. Yet it has not disappeared; it is still listed in
dictionaries, without comment, as an equivalent to Spencer's seemingly
immortal phrase.
Scott L. Montgomery is a geologist, writer, and independent scholar.
© Elsevier Science Limited 2000
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