The Meiji Literary World: the Struggle for Modernisation

Abstract

To establish the process by which the literary world of early Meiji Japan,1 inherited from the Tokugawa period (1615–1868), was transformed into one which may be called ‘modern’, it is useful to accept the organising concept of Japan as a country undergoing the process of modernisation. Modernisation, according to J. Hall, ‘involves the systematic, sustained and purposeful application of human energies to the rational [author’s italics] control of man’s physical and social environment for various human purposes’.2 It is within the context of the battle between the irrational and rational elements in the patterns of thought and behaviour of Japanese writers that the modernisation of Japanese literature took place. In its background lies the gradual process of transformation of the whole country from a pre-modern type of society into a modern state.