Nature for the nation: locating the natural world in Meiji discourses on nation-building

Abstract

Current historiography on the natural world in Meiji Japan (1868-1912) primarily focuses on exploring reconfigurations to the broad concept of “nature,” and demonstrating how these reconfigurations occurred in the sociopolitical context of nation-building of the time. Yet, in doing so, historians often neglected material conceptions of nature and how these conceptions were also renegotiated throughout the Meiji period. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the natural world, specifically conceptions of material nature, within discourses on nation-building in Meiji Japan through an analysis of how the natural world was incorporated in the visions of modernity of Meiji ideologues. This paper argues that as Meiji ideologues came face to face with the new realities of the Meiji state, the natural world was employed to articulate as well as shape their visions of modernity, and the relationship between the modern man, the nation, and the natural world to realize said vision. The natural world hence became the site in which possibilities of a modern Japanese nation were imagined and contested in Meiji intellectual and political thought. In demonstrating how Meiji ideologues such as Fukuzawa Yukichi and Shiga Shigetaka renegotiated the natural world within the discursive and broader sociopolitical contexts throughout the Meiji period, this paper therefore aims to complicate the historical and intellectual significance of the natural world in discussions of the nation-building effort of the Meiji period beyond existing historiography on nature and the environment in modern Japan.