Chapter Six

Revival of Interest in the Gold Seal in the Era and Miyake Yonekichi’s Breakthrough

There were a handful of notices that touched on the gold seal in the first two decades or more of the Meiji period, but no consensus of any sort was reached on the reading and understanding of the second and third graphs of the inscription, the topic that had so energized and exercised analysts earlier. “Ito” (Ueda Akinari, Tō Teikan, Ban Nobutomo, Aoyagi Tanenobu, and many other commentators) was by far leading the compe- tition, with a variety of other readings running distant seconds, and Kamei Nanmei’s “Yamato” having fallen way off the pack. Little in the way of debate of any sort over this issue, however, was underway in early Meiji. With the inauguration in 1889–1890 of ’s first modern historical jour- nal, Shigakkai zasshi 史學會雜誌 (renamed Shigaku zasshi 史學雜誌 in 1893), that debate was vigorously renewed. Under the influence of Ludwig Riess (1861–1928), who was invited in 1887 at the stunningly young age of twenty-five to the Imperial University in Tokyo to aid in the reform of Japanese historical research and education along German lines, this periodical was Japan’s answer to the need for a modern (namely, Central European-style) historiography. Over the first three years of its monthly publication, no fewer than eight articles appeared which addressed the topic directly or indirectly, and no other publication in the same period (1890–1892) published anything related to the topic. It was almost as if the subject matter had been wait- ing for a sufficiently serious journal, and once found nothing else would do. The eight essays were the work of four men, all well known figures of the Meiji era: Kume Kunitake 久米邦武 (1839–1931) wrote five of them, with one each by Kan Masatomo 菅政友 (1824–1897), Hoshino Hisashi 星野恒 (1839–1917), and Miyake Yonekichi. What brought about the revival of interest in this topic? To be sure, it was not the gold seal alone, but every topic in Japanese history, espe- cially of the ancient and even prehistorical past, came under scrutiny in the Meiji and subsequent Taishō periods. The new empiricist—some pre- fer to call it positivist—approach imported from Europe deemed all past research methods pre-scientific and hence naïve. If the pre-Meiji scholars had gotten anything right, this new breed effectively argued, it was largely 118 chapter six by chance. This approach to scholarship, especially as concerned China and elsewhere in East Asia, was to be challenged at the end of Meiji when Kyoto Imperial University launched its Faculty of Letters (1906), but for now the Imperial University was the only game in town. Japan’s high antiquity received particular attention for several reasons. First, how was an empiricist who had been trained to accept only hard (preferably written) evidence going to acknowledge the account of the “Age of the Gods” as chronicled in Japan’s sacred texts? When Yamagata Bantō deemed that account of the primordial past utter nonsense, he was argu- ing from a point of view shared by few others. Now, he would be joined by other scholars armed with new methodologies. Second, the Meiji period was not only an era of intense development and reform in Japan, but it was also an era when Japan broke free of the rest of East Asia and led the way for others to follow. This was a new phenomenon for Japan and the Japanese, and it required reassessment of what it meant to be Japanese, not in the older nativist way focused on the mainland of East Asia but in the present, international context of a world of competing nation-states. The answers were likely embedded in the distant past, and the gold seal was the first evidence—if one was willing to accept it as the real article— of “Japanese” contact with the outside world. But, significantly, it was now no longer approached as a relic to be honored or debunked as such, but as a text—a message in a bottle, if you will, sent from the ancient past with a mandate to assess that early history by using it. The initial commentators on the gold seal in the Meiji period—Kume, Kan, and Hoshino—all basically stayed within the established parameters of interpretations laid out in the Tokugawa period. By contrast, it would fall to Miyake to offer a breathtakingly innovative approach to this whole topic. It was thus in the process of assessing early Japanese history that the major figures on the scene touched on the seal in their work. Kume Kunitake had earlier served as secretary to 岩倉具視 (1825–1883) during the 1871–1873 mission led by the latter around the world to observe Western institutions and lobby for the revi- sion of the unequal treaties. In an 1890 study of the origins of writing in Japan, both the introduction of written graphs from the mainland and the invention of kana syllabaries, he mentioned the reference to the seal in the Later Han History and added his voice to the chorus supporting the “Ito” reading for the seal’s second and third characters.1 Interestingly, later

1 Kume Kunitake, “Honchō moji no genryū,” Shigakkai zasshi 1.7 (June 1890), pp. 15–16. He addressed the issue, again more tangentially than directly, in a two-part essay the next