¹ Sansom, G. B., The Western World and Japan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 281.Google Scholar

² Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 259.Google Scholar

³ Turner, Victor W., “Myth and Symbol,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan-Free Press, 1968), X, 576.Google Scholar

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ For paradigmatic examples in English of these opposing appraisals of the Meiji Restoration, see Moore, Barrington, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), ch. 5Google Scholar; and Hall, John Whitney, Japan: From Prehistory to Modern Times (New York: Delacorte Press, 1970), chs 11–14.Google Scholar In English, the most comprehensive treatment of Japan during the mid-nineteenth century is that of Beasley, W. G., The Meiji Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972).Google Scholar But see also the meticulous study of the bakufu's last years by Totman, Conrad D., The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862–1868 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980).Google Scholar

⁶ Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 213.Google Scholar

⁷ Burke, Kenneth, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), xv–xvi.Google Scholar

⁸ Fowler, H. W., A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 470–71.Google Scholar

⁹ Didion, Joan, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 11.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Lévi-Strauss, , Savage Mind, 258Google Scholar. Lévi-Strauss regards perceived and recorded history as a batch of “fraudulent outlines” whose only peculiar characteristic is chronology, i.e., the temporal order or sequence in which events occur (pp. 258–62). “Dates may not be the whole of history … but they are its sine qua non, for history's entire originality and distinctive nature lie in apprehending the relation between before and after, which would perforce dissolve if its terms could not … be dated.” Therefore no history of the French Revolution can give an accurate impression of what happened, but only a chronologically correct (yet contextually truncated) account of events (p. 258).

¹¹ Totman, of course, is an exception to the general tendency to write the history of the winners. His Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu chronicles the dismal if enlightening human tragedy that befell the managers of the Tokugawa system despite their best intentions and efforts.

¹² Turner, , “Myth and Symbol,” 576–77.Google Scholar

¹³ The quaternary scheme presented here derives from White's, Hayden V. 1973 article, ”Interpretation in History,” in his Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 51–80.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 6–10.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 158–239Google Scholar; for a succinct statement of the four “narrative categories of literature” as “generic plots” or mythoi, see page 162.

¹⁶ The definitions of cognition and perception are at issue here, but I am using them in a nontechnical manner outside the field of professional psychology. Both cognition and perception signify awareness or discernment as well as the process by which someone becomes aware or discerning; knowledge and its acquisition are involved.

¹⁷ Geertz, , Interpretation of Cultures, 89–90, 126–27.Google Scholar In his formulation of the complementary concepts of ethos and world view, Geertz defines ethos as “the tone, character, and quality of … life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood”; he defines world view as a people's “picture of the way things in sheer reality are, their concept of nature, of self, of society” (p. 127).

¹⁸ For an elaboration of this typology of explanatory strategies, see Pepper, Stephen C., World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942), ch. 7.Google Scholar Integrative world hypotheses, writes Pepper, are inadequate in scope, whereas dispersive ones are inadequately precise (pp. 142–46).

¹⁹ On the Richardson affair and its aftermath, see Beasley, , Meiji Restoration, 183, 199–200.Google Scholar

²⁰ The French démarche toward the bakufu is covered in English by Medzini, Meron, French Policy in Japan during the Closing Years of the Tokugawa Bakufu, Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 41 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1971), chs 8–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ On situational congruence and situational transcendence as incompatible attitudes toward existing social reality, see Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, Wirth, Louis and Shils, Edward, trans. (1936; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.), 192–204.Google Scholar

²² Quoted in Beasley, , Meiji Restoration, 256.Google Scholar

²³ Thompson, William Irwin, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 242.Google Scholar

²⁴ Shigeyoshi, Murakami, Kindai minshū shūkyō shi no kenkyū, rev. ed. (Tokyo: Hōzōkan, 1963), 91.Google Scholar

²⁵ Shigeyoshi, Murakami, “Bakumatsu ishin ki no minshū shūkyō ni tsuite,” in Minshū shūkyō no shisō, Murakami Shigeyoshi and Yasumaru Yoshio, eds., Vol. 67Google Scholar of Ninon shisō taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1971), 568–69.Google Scholar

²⁶ Ibid., 565.

²⁷ Murakami, , Kindai minshū shūkyō shi no kenkyū, 124–25.Google Scholar

²⁸ Hideo, Kishimoto, ed., Japanese Religion in the Meiji Era, Howes, John F., trans. (Tokyo: Ōbunsha, 1956), 329.Google Scholar

²⁹ Ibid., 332.

³⁰ Kitagawa, Joseph, Religion in Japanese History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 221, and n. 85.Google Scholar

³¹ For ee ja nai ka in general, see Shunsuke, Takagi, Ee ja nai ka (Tokyo: Kyōikusha, 1979).Google Scholar

³² Ibid., 210–13. I know of no postwar historian who regards ee ja nai ka as the result of a conspiracy. While the prewar scholar Tsuchiya Takao in 1931 called ee ja nai ka “the nonsense in Restoration history,” even a critic like Tōyama Shigeki, who plays down the significance of ee ja nai ka, admits that it was a popular and widespread phenomenon. See Seiji, Nishigaki, Ee ja nai ka: minshū undō no keifu (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu Ōraisha, 1973), 252Google Scholar; and Shigeki, Tōyama, Meiji ishin to gendai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1968), 103.Google Scholar

³³ Tadao, Itō, “Ee ja nai ka,” in Yonaoshi, Junnosuke, Sasaki, ed., Vol. 5Google Scholar of Nihon minshū no rekishi (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1974), 312–13, 327–28.Google Scholar A table of the frequency of rural uprisings appears on page 328.

³⁴ Ishin no gekidō, Vol. 7Google Scholar of Kyōto no rekishi (Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin, 1974), 172.Google Scholar

³⁵ Ibid., 186.

³⁶ Ibid., 360.

³⁷ Geertz, , Interpretation of Cultures, 89–90Google Scholar, holds that the relation between the two concepts of ethos and world view is one of mutual confirmation: “In religious belief and practice a group's ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view is rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a way of life.”

³⁸ Itō, , “Ee ja nai ka,” 324–31.Google Scholar

³⁹ “Koishikawa, Tora hachigatsu,” in Bakumatsu hishi shinbun kaisō, Ken-kyūkai, Meiji Bunka, ed. (1934; rpt. Tokyo: Meicho Kankōkai, 1968), 269–71.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Akira, Tanaka, Meiji ishin, Vol. 24Google Scholar of Nihon no rekishi (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1976), 28.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Akira, Tanaka, “Bakufu no tōkai,” in Kinsei 5, Vol. 13Google Scholar of Iwanami kōza nihon rekishi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1977), 344.Google Scholar

⁴² Jung, Carl Gustav, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Vol. 8Google Scholar of The Collected Works of C. Jung, G., Hull, R. F. C., trans., Bollingen Series, no. 20 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 417–531.Google Scholar

⁴³ Peirce mentions abductive reasoning in several places. He regarded it as an alternative to inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning (from the particular to the general, from the general to the particular). He said that we can know only the facts we can observe (perceive), and if they are insufficient to allow inference we must add “guess-work,” which leads to “the first starting of a hypothesis”: this step itself is what he called abduction. Even if we cannot prove X, for example, if Y were provable then X would also be provable; hence, abductive reasoning, which Peirce thought characterizes most of our inferences anyway. See Peirce, Charles Sanders, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, Buchler, Justus, ed. (New York: Dover, 1955), 150–52.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ The imperial loyalists were adventurous romantics who expended immense efforts to build an empire. It would therefore be interesting to apply Martin Green's method of linking adolescent reading habits with adult political activities in the British Empire to the data of Meiji Japan. See Green, Martin, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979).Google Scholar

⁴⁵ White, Hayden V., Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).Google Scholar White employs Frye's scheme of plot structures (mythoi), Pepper's typology of explanatory strategies, and Mannheim's dichotomy of situational congruence and situational transcendence. White's articles convey his method as effectively as the larger book does. Several of his best “essays in cultural criticism” are collected in his Tropics of Discourse.

⁴⁶ My sense of structuralism generally follows the summary by Jean Piaget more than that of Peter Caws. Both are clear expositions of a movement whose “movers” refuse to acknowledge their likenesses, and both are prescient about the intellectual development of structuralism across many disciplines during the 1970s. Both identify linguistics as the source of inspiration for structuralism. But Piaget stresses the holism of structuralist systems in their synchronic approach to problems, whereas Caws emphasizes the patterns of binary opposites, polarities, and comple mentarities that are often employed to explicate structuralist arguments. See Piaget, Jean, Structuralism, Maschler, Chaninah, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1970);Google ScholarCaws, Peter, “Structuralism,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), IV, 322–30.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ See Nagel, Ernest and Newman, James R., Gödel's Proof (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 3–6, 98–99.Google Scholar