午夜剧场

This book depicts the drama of intellectual exchange between Okakura Tenshin, who visited India in 1902, and Indian intellectuals.

The motivation for writing this book dates back to reading Okakura's works when I was a high school student. Although Okakura wrote "The Ideals of the East" during his stay in India, what he was actually doing there was considered a "mystery," which remained on my mind for a long time.

In the Faculty of Letters at Mita, I studied under Professor Masataka Suzuki, a cultural anthropologist. In graduate school, I studied abroad in Calcutta to conduct field research, but since the theme of my doctoral dissertation was rural society research, the work of tracing Okakura's footsteps remained untouched.

After returning to Japan, when I helped Professor Shigemi Inaga of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies translate Bengali materials, he told me that Japanese Bengali researchers should be the ones to tackle this kind of research, and those words stuck with me. However, Japan-India exchange was still considered a minor theme at the time.

Subsequently, with the rise of China, the Japan-India Economic Partnership Agreement and the Security Dialogue (Quad) were established, and India attracted attention as a new global power. Indian films became hits, and in 2023, it became the world's most populous country. With a recommendation for a 午夜剧场 publication grant from Professor Sayako Kanda of the Faculty of Economics, the book was finally ready for publication.

However, tracing the origins of this book brings back memories of a social studies class when I was still a junior high school student. Fukuzawa Yukichi's "Datsu-A Ron" (Leaving Asia) and Okakura's "Asia is One" were introduced, and we were asked, "Will you side with the West, or will you be with Asia?" No one could answer this binary question that seemed to determine Japan's future, and it remained a difficult problem, which may have been the underlying current for writing this book.

Recent research suggests that the 1885 "Datsu-A Ron" was not a theory of "Entering Europe" to side with the Western powers, but rather a declaration of abandoning support for Korea stemming from the failure of the Gapsin Coup. In terms of a call to break away from colonialist situations, Okakura's "Asia is One" inherited Fukuzawa's awareness of the issues. Neither was a binary question.

This book is a story of intellectual exploration that unravels the long-standing challenge since the Meiji era regarding the meaning of India for Japan through Okakura's perspective.

Masahiko Togawa

午夜剧场 Press

298 pages, 3,960 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time this magazine was published.