Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik pen Jahrgang LI – Heft 1 | Peter Lang, Bern | S. 57–100 Goethe, the Japanese National Identity through Cultural Exchange, 1889 to 1989 By Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Seiko Tasaki, Tokyo Dedicated to A . Charles Muller on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Tokyo This is a study of the alleged “singular reception career”1 that Goethe experi- enced in Japan from 1889 to 1989, i. e., from the first translation of theMi gnon song to the last issues of the Neo Faust manga series . In its path, we will high- light six areas of discourse which concern the most prominent historical figures resp. figurations involved here: (1) the distinct academic schools of thought aligned with the topic “Goethe in Japan” since Kimura Kinji 木村謹治, (2) the tentative Japanification of Goethe by Thomas Mann and Gottfried Benn, (3) the recognition of the (un-)German classical writer in the circle of the Japanese national author Mori Ōgai 森鴎外, as well as Goethe’s rich resonances in (4) Japanese suicide ideals since the early days of Wertherism (Ueruteru-zumu ウェル テルヅム), (5) the Zen Buddhist theories of Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and D . T . Suzuki 鈴木大拙, and lastly (6) works of popular culture by Kurosawa Akira 黒澤明 and Tezuka Osamu 手塚治虫 . Critical appraisal of these source materials supports the thesis that the polite violence and interesting deceits of the discursive history of “Goethe, the Japanese” can mostly be traced back, other than to a form of speech in German-Japanese cultural diplomacy, to internal questions of Japanese national identity . 1. “Goethe in Japan:” History of an Academic Discourse Research under the heading Goethe in Japan or Nihon ni okeru Gēte 日本にお けるゲーテ reflects a remarkably stable tradition distinguished by schools of thought characteristic of the 20th century Japanese academic system . Already in the second volume of the Monumenta Nipponica, published in 1939, we find an article Goethe in Japan by Jesuit Father Johannes Müller, a Germanist and the library director of the Sophia University in Tokyo . Müller also discharged 1 Osten, War Goethe ein Japaner?, p . 90 (“singuläre Rezeptionskarriere”) . © 2019 Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Seiko Tasaki - doi http://doi.org/10.3726/JA511_57 - Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 58 | Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Seiko Tasaki: Goethe teaching assignments at the Tokyo Imperial University and literally rendered “unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:21) by certifying its German studies seminar’s leading role in Japanese Goethe philology 2. And yet, his pointedly sober study from the second year of the Pacific War is formulated for a difficult internal Japanese and international situation. The Jesuit was particularly anxious not to create the “erroneous” impression of German literature as taking a preeminent position for itself in the Japanese Empire, because the real “fascination” emanated from the Russian novelists, namely Tolstoy, thus from a fervent Christian .3 With that, he intervened in an interpretational process that Kimura Kinji, a Germanist at Tokyo Imperial University, and Nishida Kitarō, a philosopher at the Kyoto Imperial University, had advanced since the early 1930s . Kimura, vice president of the Goethe Society in Japan (Nihon Gēte kyōkai 日本ゲーテ協会) founded in 1931 with Müller’s support, developed theories of an exclusive German-Japanese affinity among others in his book Japanese Spirit and German Culture (Nihon seishin to doitsu bunka 日本精神と独逸文 化, 1940), whose key concept of Nihon seishin tried to make German notions of the national spirit and national culture productive for building the Japanese identity 4. Kimura had received and accepted the commission for the eponymous subject from the Ministry of Culture, but not without qualms, which he docu- mented in the preface, that “Japanese spirit” was a buzzword risking intellectual decadence 5. This conservative shaped by Buddhism harbored no doubts about the reality of Japaneseness by blood inherited from the ancestors . The problem for him resided in the self-conscious cultivation of a Japanese identity and for which there might exist, if not a German solution, still a solution coming from Germany: the education of the Japanese elite according to Goethean precepts, understood, among others – with quotes from Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre) – as the flowering of the individuals in harmony with the general and the particular 6. During 1939/40, each of the above-mentioned book’s three chapters was then duly presented as a lecture to high school boys in Sendai, Kanazawa, and Yamagata . The publication as a whole 2 Müller, Goethe in Japan, p . 469 . 3 Müller, Goethe in Japan, pp . 477–78 . Müller represented the Christian line among others also in the first volume of the Japanese Goethe-Jahrbuch, see Müller, Die Form der Goe- thischen Prosaepik . 4 See also Roberts, Literary Nationalism, pp . 81–110 (“Goethe’s Geist and Faustian Tamashii”), especially with reference to Kimura, Nihon seishin to doitsu bunka, pp . 61–116 (“Bunka no mondai to Gēte no Fausuto” 文 化 の 問 題 とゲ ー テ の「ファ ウ スト」) . Here and throughout our translation, unless noted otherwise . 5 See Kimura, Nihon seishin, p . 3 . 6 See Kimura, Nihon seishin, p . 15, and Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, div . I, vol . 10, pp . 557–84 . References to this edition, the Frankfurter Ausgabe, given as FA from here on in; English translations taken from Goethe, The Complete Works . Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, Jahrgang LI – Heft 1 (2019) Peter Lang Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Seiko Tasaki: Goethe | 59 targeted the male youth of those elite high schools or national colleges (kōtō- gakkō 高等学校), which had been established since the late 19th century for the 12th and 13th grades, not least in consonance with the German gymnasium model . Kimura declared the antidecadent and antiliberal German Reich to be the sole foreign state capable of understanding the Japanese Empire . Goethe would have recognized Japan of the year 1940 as the very culture in which his educational ideas had been implemented to the greatest extent 7. In a private letter, Kimura explained that he had great ambitions to make a Japanese of Goethe and thereby to elevate Japanese culture 8. In his essay Goethe in Japan for the Axis political friendship magazine Berlin – Rom – Tokio he espoused among others the view that Goethe with his own frame of mind had “completely unawares” entered into a “close connection with Japan ”. 9 In 1985, Hermann Schäfer, a German diplomat stationed in Japan who had coordinated Kimura’s propaganda magazine insert, shared his reminiscences under the very same title Goethe in Japan before the German-Japanese Society in Berlin (Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft Berlin) 10. This Japanese claim to Goethe in the service of Japanese self-definition did not sit entirely well with the German Reich side . For one, it meant a neglect of contemporary Germany, and, for another, because they pursued the so-called ethnic stocktaking mainly as a parallel project between Germany and Japan, each from its own intellectual tradition, it also meant that on both sides there was a fear of degenerative effects from actual cultural interference 11. However, Kimura, first in his 1933 dissertation Studies on the Young Goethe (‘Wakaki Gēte’ kenkyū 「若きゲーテ」研究 ) and again in his comprehensive 1938 mo- nograph on Goethe, now put a personal stamp on his reading through Shin or “Pure Land” Buddhism . In particular, he realized – and here he deviated from Nazi Faustianism – that Faust’s redemption came not through the protagonist’s “own power” ( jiriki 自力), but rather by the merciful intervention of the “other power” (tariki 他力) 12. And yet, both jiriki and tariki are fundamental concepts in Japanese Buddhism, the latter also being a key concept in Pure Land Bud- dhism and connected to the veneration of the deities of mercy, such as the Amida Buddha and his female attendant Kannon, she of “infinite mercy.”13 This yielded 7 See Kimura, Nihon seishin, p . 41 . 8 See Maeda, Germanistik in Japan, p . 201 . 9 Kimura, Goethe in Japan, p . 21 (“ohne geringste Ahnung […] in eine enge Verbindung mit Japan”) . 10 See Schäfer, Goethe in Japan, pp. 51–52. Kimura’s NS affinity summarized in Maeda, Germanistik in Japan, p . 191 . 11 See Bieber, Deutsch-japanische Kulturbeziehungen, pp . 277–82 . 12 Kimura, Gēte, pp. 6–15. On Kimura’s enthusiastic co-reception of Goethe and Shinran 親鸞, the founder of Shin-Buddhism, see Maeda, Germanistik in Japan, pp . 187–89, 190, 201–03 . 13 See Suzuki, Shin Buddhism, p . 64: „Jiriki is self-power . Tariki is other-power . The Pure Land school [sc . the Shin followers] is known as the other-power school because it teaches Peter Lang Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, Jahrgang LI – Heft 1 (2019) 60 | Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Seiko Tasaki: Goethe an Asian solution to the riddle of the “mountain gorges” scene, in which Faust, after all his involvement in ghastly acts, is solemnly redeemed . This was supported by Goethe letting the “mater glorisosa” in this scene be addressed in rather unchristian fashion as “goddess:” “Virgin, mother, queen/ goddess gracious be ”. 14 That Faust has to strip off the “superhuman” to be saved and to partake of “love from above” was already taught by Raphael von Koeber, the first holder of a professorship in philosophy at the University of Tokyo, which had a direct impact on his student Abe Jirō 阿部次郎 in the latter’s book The Conquest of Hell (Jigoku no seifuku 地獄の征服) 15. But, as Kimura divulged in a very personal preface to his 1938 Goethe book, he understood his Buddhist theory of salvation less in the humanistic terms of Koeber and Abe and more as a decision for theocratic reverence and against material compensation as the foundation of society .