...They found their best spokesman in Takayama Chogyü who developed a wide-ranging theory of cultural nationalism between 1897-1902 that mixed minzoku and race, nationality and Asiansim, all the while drawing heavily on Western theorists in order to denounce the deleterious effects of Western culture on Japan. Takayama understood Japan's growing tensions with Russia as part of a broader idea og global "racial was" that Ludwig Gumplowics had sketched in Der Rassenkampf (1883).
From this racial lens, Takayama was certain that the Triple Intervention, Russian designs on Korea, and even the 1875-78 war between Russia and Turkey and the 1897 war between Greece and Turkey (Takayama believed Turkey was part of the East, or "the Turanian race") were indicative of a "600 year old racial war between the Aryan race and the Turanian race.
Against Warase's argument that a modern state was able to withstand the challenges of a multiethnic populace. Takayama drew from Max Müller and Henry George to argue that a state cannot simply be a territorial administrative unit, but must be built on with and through a single people with a shared cultual identity.
Thus, even through the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese and others were all part of the Turanian race, their distinctiveness resulted from the fact that this race, like all races, was divided into Naturvölker (shizen minzoku) and Kulturvölker (jinbun minzoku).
The Naturvölker were those peoples who had yet to develop an integral, shared culture that provided the dynamism for their own independent states; the Kulturvölker were those ethnic groups who had emerged out of the state of nature to built an independent state on the basis of their unique culture. Of course, among the Turanian race, only Japan met the requirements of a Kulturvölker. In one broad sweep of the pen. Takayam had sketched the conceptual foundations for modern Japanese imperalism as well as the grounds for cultualist attacks on Christianity as a foreign creed incompatible with the culture of the emperor-nation. Not surprisingly, his last work publisched ,n 1902, the year he died, was an exploration of the thinking of the medieval xenophobic Buddhist monk, Nichiren.
The annexation of Korea in 1910 renewed and sharpened the debate on weather Japan should be a homogeneous ethnic nation-state and whether the concept of minzoku was flexible enough to incorporate Koreans in the Japan minzoku. Again, Christian intellectuals played a leading role in asserting an optimistic, open reading of the potential limits of ethnic assimilation, while the Japanist and statist intellectuals like Takayama and Inoue Tetsujirö were slow to accept a sense of minzoku that was not thoroughly and exclusively racist. Yamaji Aizan had laid the foundations for his fellow Christians, arguing several years prior to annexation that the Japanese were a "composite" nation, historically formed through a combination of Ainu, Malay and the Yamato (a branch of the Turanian race).
page 224:
A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People by Kevin Doak
copyright 2007,by Koninklijke Brill NV, The Netherlands (click)
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