| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Douglas R. Howland. Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 292. $27.95.

Japan's rapid entry into international politics in the latter 1800s entailed a challenging intellectual struggle with new words and ideas. As Douglas R. Howland puts it, concepts such as liberty and people's rights "were under construction" in these years; "both their form and meaning were unsettled" (p. 5). While his analysis of the period's establishment thinkers may overstate the static nature of earlier studies, it makes abundantly clear just how complex and nuanced the era's debates were and, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck's Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history), how important translated words were in establishing the intellectuals' "horizon of expectations" (p. 29). 1

Howland begins with a discussion of the "enlightenment model" under which early Meiji (1868–1912) thinkers counted on elite education, grounded in moral instruction, to move the Japanese people toward modernity. Next, pursuing his conviction that "translation technique and political thought developed in parallel" (p. 184), he describes the methods intellectuals used in translating Western ideas into Japanese during the 1870s and 1880s. He then devotes the heart of the book to debates over three concepts—liberty, rights, and society—arguing that each was far more elastic, the site of more contention, than historians have recognized. . . .

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