10 - The impact of social sciences on the process of development in Japan

Summary

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF SOCIAL SCIENCES IN JAPAN

The preceding chapters dealing with European experience show that, despite national differences, the countries shared implicit assumptions about the nature of the social knowledge produced by the social sciences. The concept of knowledge, empirical and often quantitative, was itself historically produced (see Wittrock et al. (chapter 2) and Bulmer (chapter 6) in particular). Although it was not always uncontested, this conception of knowledge derived from experience in Western societies. Most Asian societies, in contrast, have a long tradition of knowledge based on other forms of understanding. When social science arrived, it was a foreign import. It was implanted from outside, and it proceeded to develop in interrelation with the political structures and knowledge-producing institutions of these societies. Here we turn to the case of Japan.

Japan has had its own native or Confucian social and political ideas since the seventh century. In the eighteenth century, under Tokugawa rule, new social and political ideas, like their European counterparts, laid special emphasis on rationality, practicality, and system. Baigan Ishida (1685–1744) propounded the economic doctrine of Sekimon Shingaku (see Bellah, 1957), which taught the legitimacy of trading and advocated the virtues of diligence, thrift, honesty, and dedication. Banri Hoashi (1778–1852) (see Sha, 1975; Kurauchi, 1962, p. 80) was a creative thinker who proposed a systematization of mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology rather similar to that of Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42).