史学 Shigaku /History
摘要
史学 Shigaku/History Thomas Keirstead (bio) Introduction: Shigaku as Discipline Histories of the historical discipline in Japan regularly refer back to a pair of inaugural moments. One is the imperial edict of 1869 that named history a national priority and established an office for the compilation of national history.1 The other is the arrival in 1887 of one Ludwig Riess to take up a position in the department of history at the newly established Tokyo Imperial University. The first moment, throwing the state behind the production of history, seemed to fulfill Hegel’s dictum that the state was the proper subject and object of history, while the second is seen as marking the beginning of the fully academic study of history (shigaku) in Japan. The embarrassing denouement of the first opening—the project was aborted when instead of producing a modern history of the nation, the compilers opted for a national history in Chinese on the archaic model of the Six National Histories (Rikkokushi, 720-901)—sets the stage for the second, successful instantiation of shigaku. Though a remarkably undistinguished historian, Riess brought with him a connection to the godfather of modern academic history, Leopold von Ranke. Variously described as secretary, acolyte, or member of Ranke’s seminar (in fact, Riess was too young to have been any of these things in any serious way; he could only have encountered a very elderly and long-retired Ranke), he provides a link in a genealogy tying the modern study of history in Japan to its fabled foundations in Ranke’s seminar.2 In this way, Ranke’s determinedly objective, archival, document-and-seminar-based practice of history became enshrined at the Imperial University (as at much the same time it was being established in the United States and elsewhere). This framework for the study of history was completed in 1889, two years after Reiss’s arrival, with the formation of a Historical Association, the Shigakkai, and the founding of its journal, S