4. From Rites and Music to National Music

移風易俗，莫善於樂。

For changing their [i.e., the people’s] manners and altering their customs, there is nothing better than music.1

Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who shall make the laws.²

Japan’s success as the first non-Western country to succeed in building a modern nation as a response to Western dominance and the threat of colonization has meant that its nationhood has often been taken for granted. Tokugawa Japan, however, was not a nation state, even if it had some of the attributes associated with modern nations. Within, it was a federation of domains, or ‘countries’.³ Without, it was part of the Sinosphere, or China-centred world order, in which the Chinese empire, as well as being the most powerful entity in East Asia, represented a normative reference.4 Western encroachment not only resulted in geopolitical upheaval, but in a major epistemic change, in which Sinocentric universality gave way to the assumed universality of Western standards and norms.

The universality of Western civilization was generally accepted in Meiji Japan. It was understood both as a universal stage in world history and as a description of contemporary Europe and America.⁵ Characterizing Western practices worthy of introduction to Japan as markers of ‘civilization’ and ‘enlightenment’ enabled Meiji leaders to ‘transcend the potential opposition of ‘Japanese’ and ‘foreign’.⁶ The new concept of bunmei (with its opposite, ‘barbarian’ or yaban) adopted in Meiji Japan was based on a Western concept that took Western standards as given, but claimed their universality. But this did not mean that civilization was equated with Westernization. In fact, the language of civilization and enlightenment (bunmei kaika―with kaika commonly used to describe the process of civilizing) ‘was used to promote ideas at every point along the ideological spectrum’.7

This was possible because the Sinosphere too had a concept of a civilized world and its opposite: ka’i. ‘Ka’ stood for the civilized realm: China. In Tokugawa Japan, ka’i distinguished civilized subjects of the shogun from barbarians.8 After the Meiji Restoration, the government in the name of the emperor took the place of the shogunate, while the concept itself remained. A good example is the Imperial Rescript on Historiography, which was issued on 4 April 1869 and decreed the compilation of an official history in the tradition of Chinese and ancient Japanese ruler-centred histories as a means of legitimation. The Rescript ends with the exhortation, ‘Let us set right the relations between monarch and subject, distinguish clearly between the alien and the proper (ka’i naigai) and implant virtue throughout our land.’9 Naigai literally means ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, thus emphasizing the spatial element of the concept, which contrasts with the linear concept of civilization as the apex of a universal ladder of progress.

The ka’i concept of civilization and barbarianism, with its spatial connotations, can be discerned in the expression bunmei no iki or bunmei no eiiki;¹⁰ Shikama Totsuji, for example, uses the latter in his editorial in the inaugural issue of Ongaku zasshi (The musical magazine).11 The emphasis on reforming customs in the early Meiji period, moreover, reflected the Japanese actors’ understanding of the ‘relationship between correct customs and an orderly realm’ as a universal truth. The fact that Westerners did view some Japanese customs as uncivilized reinforced the assumption ‘that outward customs lay at the very heart of the Western conception of civilization’.¹²

Music represented a marker of civilization, whether conceived as bunmei versus yaban, or as ka’i. In Confucian thought, music played a central role in maintaining a well-ordered and well-governed realm where civilized customs prevailed. In the Book of Rites, music, together with rites, laws, and punishment, is treated as an indispensable part of good government; it is associated with heaven, with harmony, joy, similarity, and unity (in contrast to rites, which are associated with distinction and separation), with the spiritual and human affections, and with order, including the regulation of physical movement.13 Confucius is said to have loved music, played music himself and regarded it as an important part of education and, together with ceremonies or ‘rites’, of government. The right music could influence people for the good, while bad music had the opposite effect. The Five Classics, of which the Book of Rites is one, formed the core of the kangaku (Chinese learning) canon, and most of the actors in the Restoration and the reforms that followed were educated in the tradition of kangaku.

At the same time, music and its role in society was not a major preoccupation for most Confucian scholars in the Tokugawa period.14 Among the exceptions were Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) and his disciple Dazai Shundai (1680–1747), who advocated a renewed focus on the ancient Confucian texts, rather than the Neo-Confucian canon. Sorai developed his own interpretation of the Confucian classics. He stressed music even more than ‘rites’; performing music meant learning with the body, which in turn influenced the heart. Music could transform people in a way that words and laws could not. It was Sorai’s contention that the good and right music of old (kogaku) approved by the ancient sages was lost in China, but preserved in Japan. One of his aims, therefore, was to recover this music. Sorai regarded the popular music of his time, including koto and shamisen music, as unacceptable and a potentially pernicious influence. Shundai further elaborated on his teacher’s thinking.15

The legacy of Confucian thought continued to be influential even after 1868. Private academies teaching Chinese learning continued to play a significant role until the 1890s or longer, and the Five Classics were (at least nominally) part of the curriculum.16 Chinese learning, in particular the Sinitic written language, was, moreover, an important vehicle for mediating the adoption of Western concepts, while Confucianism continued to provide the foundations of moral education.17 Confucian ideas about the role of music likewise continued, as is evident in the debates about music reform. The epistemological shift occurred gradually, and it is not certain how aware Meiji intellectuals were aware of its extent. The use of Sinitic terms to translate Western concepts made it possible to obscure the epistemological distance between them, as the examples of ongaku and bunmei illustrate.

In sum, both ancient cultures shared the belief in an ordered universe and in the important role of music within it. Both developed a theoretical framework of music that included a concept of harmony and the idea of music having an essential role in promoting good morals and therefore having significance for good government.

The perceived universality of Western music, moreover, did not rest solely on its link with civilization but also on the belief that it was rooted in the universal principles of the natural sciences. Here too, ‘universal’ essentially meant ‘Western’. With the scientific revolution in Europe, principles from the natural sciences came to be applied to music theory,20 while scientific instruments originally used for research in physics were used in efforts to standardize musical practice: the metronome (rhythm), and the tuning fork (pitch).21 In early modern Europe, the study of music was characterized as a ’desire for unity between theory and empiricism’.²² Theory, especially theory of harmony, was perceived as universal. Musical practice, on the other hand, was acknowledged to be dependent on time and place. The historiography of music came under the influence of Darwinian ideas, and the history of music (like history in general) came to be seen as a series of stages in human development towards maturity, with Europe having reached the most advanced stage. Herbert Spencer, one of the first to apply Darwin’s ideas to culture, described musical development as ‘progressive integration’ from the ‘simple cadence [...], which in the changes of savages is monotonously repeated’, and, ‘among the civilized races’ becomes ‘a long series of different musical phrases combined into one whole’.23 (‘Changes’ here, presumably refers to a sequence of pitches as in bell-ringing.)

Western ideas about music as a marker of civilization and of human progress meant that music was perceived as an essential ingredient of modernization and nation-building. At the same time the notion harmonized with the ‘rites-and-music’ perception of music as a means for civilizing the people. Kume Kunitake’s report of the Embassy’s first visit to a school, where they were greeted by singing, spelt out the connection:

Through singing students praise the divine, and it brings harmony to the heart. The piano accompaniment instils rhythm and timing into their dance steps. Both boys and girls study singing, which attunes the emotions. This corresponds in meaning to the appointment of the official K’uei Tzŭ as director of music by the legendary Emperor Shun so that spirits and men would be brought into harmony.24

This straddling of epistemes is even more clearly evident in the first book-length history of music in Japan, published in 1888 by Konakamura Kiyonori, a leading scholar of kokugaku (National learning). Entitled Kabu ongaku ryakushi (A brief history of music and dance), the book treats the various musical genres of Japan (including performing arts, of which music is a part) under the heading ongaku, which in itself is remarkable, since ongaku, or music, as an overarching concept for the separate genres was not yet well established. Konakamura himself, when he wrote the first version of the book in 1880, used the term ongyoku (musical performance) rather than ongaku. He changed ongyoku to ongaku sometime between 1880 and 1883, while in conference with Shigeno Yasutsugu, a prominent scholar of Chinese learning.25 Shigeno himself is credited with having written the first, albeit short, chronological history of music in Japan, treating music comprehensively, across the genres, although the word ongaku does not appear in the title, Fūzoku kabu genryū kō (Considerations about the origin of popular music and dance).26

Rarely used before Meiji, ongaku had connotations of serious, official, predominantly instrumental music. In other words, the sort of music that could be part of ‘rites and music’ (reigaku). Another connotation of ongaku is ‘foreign’, which in ancient Japan meant Chinese, and in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods increasingly meant ‘Western’. 27

That ‘ongaku’ had not yet gained general currency around 1880 is also suggested by a series of articles written by Ono Shōgorō (1841–?), an early advocate of music reform (see Chapter 7). His first article was entitled ‘Ongaku okusu beshi’ (Music should be promoted).²⁸ In the article itself, he referred to music as ‘gaku’ and only uses the word ‘ongaku’ one more time, in the final paragraph. The three instalments of the following article are entitled ‘Ongyoku no fusei wa jinmin no hinkō o midaru’ (Improper musical performance corrupts the moral conduct of the people). We can assume that Ono was aware of the different connotations of ongaku and ongyoku, and that the choice was conscious.

Ongaku was the obvious word to translate the Western term ‘music’, despite the fact that there was a huge ‘epistemological gap between the foreignness implied in the vernacular conceptualization and the humanism and abstraction in the Western one’; a gap that Meiji intellectuals were not fully aware of.29

Konakamura not only consulted with Shigeno, whose name appears as the first of four scholars in Konakamura’s acknowledgements at the end of the book.30 He asked him to contribute a preface, which Shigeno duly did. The body of the book is written in Japanese, the obvious choice for a scholar of National learning. Shigeno’s preface, however, is composed in Sinitic (kanbun), an equally obvious choice for Shigeno, a renowned kanbun stylist in his time, kanbun having for centuries served as the language of official documents and of scholarship. National learning as a school developed in the Tokugawa period in opposition to Chinese learning, and in scholarship it emphasized the study of Japanese texts as opposed to the Chinese classics. In the early Meiji period, representatives of both schools were often in conflict as they competed for influence in shaping the institutions, scholarship, and ideology of the emerging nation state.31 Both schools, however, were part of the Sinosphere, soon to be replaced by the modern academic disciplines introduced from the West. Indeed, this transformation is represented in Konakamura’s book by a second preface, in English, contributed by Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935). Chamberlain had recently (in 1886) become the first professor of Japanese and philology at the Imperial University.

Both Konakamura’s choice of the term ongaku and his request for a preface from Shigeno served to elevate the music of Japan as a whole, including popular genres, to the status of serious and refined music that was worthy of being considered the music of the nation. This interpretation is suggested by Shigeno’s words in the preface. It is remarkable for the way it combines four different frames of reference: the Sinosphere, the Japanese nation, the world of nations, and, by adding the name of his home domain, Satsuma, to his signature, Shigeno invokes a sub-national entity, suggesting that he regarded it as a defining part of his identity, even as the ideology of the unified, homogenous nation was emerging. Significantly, Shigeno’s own work on music emphasizes its alleged Satsuma roots.

The contents can be divided into three sections. Shigeno begins by paraphrasing the summary presented by Konakamura himself in the conclusion of his book. He then praises Konakamura, whom he refers to as ‘Ryōsō’, a Sinitic-style pen-name,32 for his meticulous scholarship and for including genres of music and performance that previous generations of scholars regarded with contempt. Finally, he sums up the place of music in Japan in his own time and concludes:

The ancient music of China and Korea has long been lost over there, but exists over here. This being so, may we not reasonably call it our own music? Nowadays, we have friendly relations with many foreign countries, and the music of many countries is being disseminated widely in our country at a rate increasing day by day. We take up and practise good and beautiful music, just as we did with the ancient music of China and Korea, which was lost in its country of origin but has been preserved in Japan. In other words, in Japan alone, all the most beautiful music of the world is brought together. Japan can be described as the world’s largest gakubu.33 Without doubt, no one is better placed than Ryōsō to compile a work such as the present one.³⁴

Shigeno’s intellectual rootedness in the Sinocentric world order is evident from his reference to the music of the Tang and Han periods as representing a gold standard and his positioning of Japan as the legitimate heir of China, cultivating this music even while it has declined in its land of origin. At the same time, he praised Konakamura for including the different genres of common music (zokugaku) in his work. Later, researchers would adopt the German concept of the ‘Volk’ to describe the music of the common people, but here already that music is ennobled by being treated as a valid expression of Japanese sentiment. The significance of this view becomes clear when contrasted with the statements of leading intellectuals in defence of the Tokyo Academy of Music in 1890 (see Chapter 6). One of the most important arguments in defence of the Academy was the perceived need to reform common music, for which several commentators expressed the deepest contempt. In their calls for music reform as a vital part, and even a decisive measure of reforming customs, several of the defenders quoted from the Confucian classics. In other words, they were expressing a world view that was characterized by the reigaku approach to music that regarded the music of the common people as an embarrassment.

Nations exist in a world of nations, and in his conclusion, Shigeno refers to the global stage of competing nations (here, as so often in Meiji Japan, referred to as shokoku) as a new source of knowledge and inspiration. For Shigeno, Japan’s cultural borrowing from China served as a precedent for borrowing from the West. The international angle is reinforced by Chamberlain’s preface. The endorsement by a foreign professor, written in the language of the most powerful Western nations, served to further elevate the music of Japan as well as reinforce the universality implicit in the abstract term as ongaku. Chamberlain described music as a ‘universal language’, although he conceded that this supposedly single language has branched out into dialects.35 Chamberlain, unlike Shigeno, did not receive the manuscript of the book and his preface appears somewhat perfunctory,36 but that is hardly the point.

Konakamura’s book with its two foreign prefaces legitimized indigenous music, by giving it a pedigree, and cultural borrowing from the West by treating Japan’s adoption of music from China as a precedent and characterizing Japan as a cultural repository where all the different musics were assimilated and preserved. The way was thus prepared for the creation of a national music that blended imported and indigenous elements.

The creation of a national music was the goal of Isawa Shūji, whose name, more than any other, is associated with the introduction of Western music in Meiji Japan.

1 Classic of Filial Piety, quoted from Chinese Text Project: https://ctext.org/xiao-jing?searchu=%E6%A8%82
2 Matilda H. Kriege, The Child, Its Nature and Relations: An Elucidation of Froebel’s Principles of Education. A Free Rendering of the German of the Baroness Marenholtz-Bülow. (New York: E. Steiger & Co., 1872), 92–93. The quote (the exact wording varies) is most commonly attributed to the Scottish Politician and writer Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653–1716). See Gant, Music, 66.

3 See Luke S. Roberts, Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), 8–15. The word kuni (country) in Tokugawa Japan could refer both to a region and to Japan as a whole.
4 Joshua A. Fogel, Articulating the Sinosphere : Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For China as a normative reference, see David Mervart, ‘Meiji Japan’s China Solution to Tokugawa Japan’s China Problem’, Japan Forum 27, no. 4 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2015.1077881
5 Carol Gluck, ‘The End of Elsewhere: Writing Modernity Now (AHR Roundtable),’ American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 681, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.3.676
6 Mark Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8, 11. Ravina refers to this strategy as ‘cosmopolitan chauvinism’.
7 David L. Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 156.
8 Howell, Geographies, 131, 156.
9 Author’s translation from the text quoted in Toshiaki Ōkubo, Nihon kindai shigaku no seiritsu, Ōkubo Toshiaki rekishi chosakushū 7, (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1988), 42. See Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan: The World, the Nation and the Search for a Modern Past (Second edition with new preface) (Copenhagen: The Sound Book Press, 2017 (1998)), 1.
10 Douglas R. Howland, Translating the West (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002).
11 Totsuji Shikama, ‘Hakkan no shushi’, Ongaku zasshi 1 (1890).
12 Howell, Geographies, 158.
13 Ch’u Chai and Winberg Chai, eds., Li Chi (Book of Rites): An Encyclopedia of Ancient Ceremonial Usages, Religious Creeds, and Social Institutions, translated by James Legge, 2 vols., vol. 2 (New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1967). See also Walter Kaufmann, Musical References in the Chinese Classics, Detroit Monographs in Musicology (Detroit: Information Coordinators Inc., 1976).
14 See, for example, Demin Tao, ‘Tominaga Nakamoto no Ongakukan: ”Gakuritsukō” no kenkyū’, in Nihon kangaku shisōshi ronkō: Sorai, Nakamoto oyobi kindai (Suita: Kansai Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1999).
15 Mostly based on Yasunori Kojima, ‘Ogyū Sorai ichimon no ongaku shikō to sono reigaku kan’, in Reigaku bunka: Higashi Ajia no kyōyō, ed. Yasunori Kojima (Tokyo: Perikansha, 2013). See also Tao, ‘Tominaga Nakamoto no Ongakukan’.
16 Margaret Mehl, ‘Chinese Learning (kangaku) in Meiji Japan’, History 85 (2000), https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.00137; Margaret Mehl, Private Academies of Chinese Learning in Meijji Japan: The Decline and Transformation of the Kangaku Juku (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003). See also Margaret Mehl, ‘Transmutations of the Confucian Academy in Japan: Private Academies of Chinese Learning (kangaku juku 漢学塾) in Late Tokugawa and Meiji Japan as a Reflection and Motor of Epistemic Change,’, in Confucian Academies in East Asia, ed. Vladimír Glomb, Eun-Jeung Lee, and Martin Gehlmann (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

17 Howland likewise emphasizes the role of kangaku in mediating between Japan and the West: see Howland, Translating the West, 60.

18 Edward A. Lippman, Musical Thought in Ancient Greece (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1964); Eckhard Nolte and Reinhold Weyer, eds., Musikalische Unterweisung im Altertum: Mesopotamien - China - Griechenland, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikpädagogik (Frankfurt a. M. et al.: Peter Lang, 2011).
19 Reinhold Hammerstein, Die Musik der Engel: Untersuchungen zur Musikanschauung des Mittelalters (Bern: Francke, 1962).
20 On the history of musicology in the context of the humanities, see Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 (2013)). On science and musical modernity, see Johnson, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 286–89, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190233273.001.0001
21 Myles W. Jackson, ‘From Scientific Instruments to Musical Instruments: Tuning Fork, Metronome, and Siren’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford University Press, 2012).
22 Bod, New History, 200.
23 Quoted in Bennett Zon, ‘Science and Religion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis (Oxford University Press, 2020), 389–90. Spencer’s thinking became known in Japan even before his works were translated. For a recent assessment of his influence, see G. Clinton Godart, ‘Spencerism in Japan: Boom and Bust of a Theory‘, in Global Spencerism: The Communication and Appropriation of a British Evolutionist ed. Bernard Lightman (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
24 Embassy’s visit to the Denman School for girls in San Francisco on 23 January 1872: Kunitake Kume, The Iwakura Embassy 1871–73: A True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’s Journey of Observation through the United States of America and Europe, ed. Graham Healey and Chushichi Tsuzuki, trans. Graham Healey, Martin Colcutt, Andrew Cobbing, P. F. Kornicky, Eugene Soviak, Chushichi Tsuzuki, 5 vols., vol. 1: The United States of America (Kamiyakiri, Matsudo, Chiba: The Japan Documents, 2002), 75.
25 For details of the correspondence between Shigeno and Konakamura, see Kei Saitō, <Ura> Nihon ongakushi: ikei no kindai (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 2015), 32–34. Saitō cites Konakamura’s diary and his correspondence with Shigeno.

26 The article was published in two parts in 1881 and 1883: Yasutsugu Shigeno, ‘Fūzoku kabu genryū kō’, in Zōtei Shigeno hakushi shigaku ronbunshū, ed. Toshiaki Ōkubo (Tokyo: Meicho Fukyūkai, 1989).
27 Saitō, <Ura> Nihon ongakushi, 31–32; Shuhei Hosokawa, ’Ongaku, Onkyō/Music, Sound’, in Working Words: New Approaches to Japanese Studies (20 April: Center for Japanese Studies, UC Berkeley, 2012). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9451p047
28 Shōgorō Ono, ‘Ongaku okosu beshi’, Kōshū joshi 14 (1877); Shōgorō Ono, ‘Ongyoku no fusei wa jinmin no hinkō o midaru’ Kōshū joshi 15–17 (1877). See Kanako Kitahara and Sumire Yamashita, ‘Kyū Sendai hanshi Ono Shōgorō no ongakuron, “Ongyoku no fusei wa jinmin no hinkō o midaru”’, Hirosaki Daigaku kokushi kenkyū 143 (October 2017).
29 Hosokawa, ‘Ongaku, Onkyō/Music, Sound’, 3.
30 Kiyonori Konakamura, Kabu ongaku ryakushi (Tokyo: Konakamura Kiyonori, 1888), 56. The other three named are Kurita Hiroshi (the scholar credited with completing the Dai Nihonshi, begun by the lord of Mito in the Tokugawa period and faithfully modelled on Chinese dynastic histories), Kosugi Sugimura (a scholar of National learning), and Kashiwagi Kaichirō (an antiquarian). See Margaret Mehl, ‘From Classical to National Scholarship: Konakamura Kiyonori’s History of Music in Japan (1888) and Its Foreign-Language Prefaces’, History of Humanities 8, no. 1 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1086/723948
31 See Mehl, History and the State.
32 Literary names with their Sinitic readings and references to the Chinese classics were more common among kangaku scholars.

33 ‘Music Office’; Shigeno seems to be using the term in the sense of a repository.

34 Shigeno Yasutsugu, preface to Konakamura, Kabu ongaku ryakushi.
35 Konakamura, Kabu ongaku ryakushi. Chamberlain’s preface (handwritten in the 1888 edition), is followed by a Japanese translation (anonymous), where his surname is preceded by his Sinitic penname Ōdō.

36 According to Konakamura’s diary, he received Chamberlain’s preface a week after having asked him to write it. See Yoshiki Ōnuma, ed., Konakamura Kiyonori nikki (Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 2010), 219, 220.