The study of nationalism, the most powerful political emotion in the modern world, has often become enmeshed in polemic and ideological combat. In Japan during the past century, evaluations of the historical role of nationalism have tended to oscillate between extremes. Some of its first serious students in the late nineteenth century, writers like Kuga Katsunan and Miyake Setsurei, opposing the prevalent Westernism, were convinced that nationalism was a necessary ingredient of Japanese survival; and they would have agreed with Tocqueville's aphorism that “the interests of the human race are better served by giving every man a particular fatherland than by trying to inflame his passions for the whole of humanity.” Since 1945, however, in a mood of national self-alienation, many Japanese writers have shared Veblen's turgid conclusion, “Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to lead human institutions to the service of dissension and distress. In its material effects it is altogether the most sinister as well as the most imbecile of all the institutional incumbrances that have come down out of the old order.” Once seen as necessary and beneficial, nationalism came in the post-war period to be villified or simply ignored amidst the scholars' preoccupation with their anti-establishment liberal heroes. With some notable exceptions, nationalism has been slow to receive in Japan the thoughtful, dispassionate study it needs.

Few concepts in modern times are as full of paradoxes as nationalism. Widely agreed to be a general phenomenon of modern politics, it is known also to vary drastically in character in every country. It is presumed to make politics rational and purposeful, yet it is conceptually irrational, more akin to a “religion,” as Carleton Hayes once noted, than to a definable conceptual construct. Lacking precise definition, it is subject to manipulation and to being used as justification for a bewildering variety of often contradictory forms of political and social action. Despite this imprecision, it is thoroughly enmeshed in modern historiography, and the historian has little recourse than to seek greater precision in the use of this concept by providing it with explicit historical content. Of the many tasks that might be undertaken in this area, certainly one of the more serious is the reconstruction of patterns of political thought formulated in the traditional setting that exercised powerful influences on the specific character of nationalism in the modern history of a country. Especially important from the standpoint of this essay are those modes of thought that conceptualized subjective action against existing politics as being in the real or purported interest of the wider polity. For nationalism in modern Jajan, the key in this regard is, without question, the concept of “restorationism.”

Kōtoku Shūsui is generally known as a socialist and anarchist who participated in the plot against the life of the Meiji emperor in 1910 and was executed for the crime of “high treason” the following year. Such an individual hardly strikes one as a nationalist. Why deal with him on a panel that proposes to address itself to the question of nationalism? And yet, contrary to surface appearance, Kōtoku was and remained a nationalist. But his image of nationalism, and the role that this force should play in the lives of the Japanese people differed considerably from that of the Meiji leadership. It is to this image, to how it was derived, and to how it was sustained that this paper is addressed.

It is often said that the nationalism of the 1930's was more “narrow,” more “parochial,” more “isolationist,” and more “pathological” than the nationalism of Meiji. In the earlier period, men like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Ōi Kentarō, who had ingested the liberalism of the late Victorian West, defined Japan's identity and role in the world in cosmopolitan, even revolutionary terms. By contrast, it is said, the nationalists of the 1930's were “frogs at the bottom of a well,” whose vision of the nation was clouded by folkish myths of national superiority or who were moved at most by narrow concern for national self-interest. The men of Shōwa, unlike those of Meiji, lacked a conception of Japan's role in the world which admitted the claims of higher goal or value than the nation itself.

Nationalism is an emotionally colored concept in many respects, and this makes it quite difficult for an outside observer to attain an objective, rational understanding of it. When we deal with the nationalism of modern Europe, we can find a common background of Christian culture which transcends all the differences in nationality and national character among European countries. No doubt each variety of modern European nationalism is characterized by its own national tradition, national interest and national mission. There have also been severe competition and numerous conflicts among the national states of Europe, and whatever differences exist among European countries can be easily attributed to the uniqueness of national character and can be explained in terms of nationalism. But those differences are only relative and parts of the unified whole.

If the several articles assembled here dramatize a long-standing suspicion that our understanding of nationalism has not progressed very far beyond its original conceptualization, they also reveal the limitations of this tradition of discourse which we have had to work in. Yet in disclosing the limitations of this tradition they have in fact gone beyond it. In viewing the subject as a condition of a more basic problematik they have raised new questions demanding serious accountability and, perhaps, cleared the way for a total reassessment of nationalism as history and hermeneutic. In the following pages I would like to rehearse a few of the ideas found in these papers and pursue some of the implications of their suggestiveness.

Although Māra, the Buddhist symbol of evil, has been the subject of a number of books and essays, little has been written about the numerous Pali and Sanskrit textual references to a plurality of Māras. In Buddhist literature there are passages, more characteristic of the Pali canonical texts, which can be interpreted as references to a general, often unspecified plurality of Māras, while other passages, more frequently found in the Sanskrit treatises, specify four Māras and designate a name for each. The purpose of this study is to show how the four Māras function as a summary formula for the diverse ways in which the term “Māra” came to be used, and following that, to consider the meaning this plurality of Māra symbols has for the Buddhist understanding of evil (pāpa).

One of the most striking facts about the history of modern Vietnam has been the persistent strength of the communist movement. In part, of course, this strength must be attributed to the organizational abilities of the communists themselves. But it might also be said that it is a testament to the weakness of the more moderate elements within the nationalist movement. Resistance to French control has a long history in Vietnam, dating back to the original conquest in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet only after the Second World War, when the communist-dominated Vietnam Independence League (Vietminh) led resistance to French authority, did a movement of truly national proportions arise in the country. By their leadership of the Vietminh, the communists became the most potent political force within the nationalist movement. By contrast, non-Marxist parties were consistently plagued by political factionalism and lack of unity, a reality that has been a major contributing factor to the contemporary tragedy in that country today.

By the 1940's, China already had a well-established tradition of student activism. The most famous of the Chinese student movements had originated with the demonstration of May 4, 1919, against the Versailles Peace Settlement. Punctuating Chinese politics thereafter were numerous student demonstrations: the protest against the unequal treaties on May 30, 1925; the condemnation of Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931; and the demand for resistance to Japan on December 9, 1935. Youth leaders of the 1940's were conscious of the May 4th tradition, as they called it. They were proud of the tradition and felt an obligation to keep it alive. They accepted a role as a politicized elite with the right and duty to speak for the Chinese people. As the competition between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party for control of China's destiny entered its critical stage between 1945 and 1949, Chinese students sought active participation in China's revolution.

The poetry of the “Chhayavad” group and the later fiction of Premchand together represent the first, and thus far the finest, flowering of the new literary Hindi, based on Khaṟī bolī, that became accepted as standard during the last half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Before that time the phase of Hindi known as Braj, spoken chiefly around Mathura, had been preferred to khaṟī bolī, the Hindi of the Delhi-Meerut region. The credit for the triumph of khaṟī bolī is usually attributed to Pandit Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, who devoted himself energetically to the reform and propagation of the language, particularly from 1903 to 1920, when he was editor of the influential journal Saraswatī. But although he contributed greatly to the improvement of Hindi style and diction and to the development of its literary potential, it must also be noted that the so-called “Dwivedi-yug” saw the creation of no masterpieces in the new idiom. None of the poets published in Saraswatī during Dwivedi's editorship commands much more than historical interest now, with the exception of Maithili Sharan Gupta, whose great work, in any case, was not to appear until the thirties. It was the Chhayavadins who first fulfilled the promise of the Bharatendu and Dwivedi periods (ca. 1870–1920) with the publication of such volumes as Nirala's Anāmikā (first version, 1922) and Parimal (1930), Prasad's revised Jharnā (1927), Pant's Pallav (1928), and Mahadevi Verma's Nihār (1930).

Even as recently as a dozen years ago, one learned basic Sinological methods rather much the way one learned about sex: by osmosis and “from the gutter.” One puzzled over the remarks of his professors, looked up the strange words in the dictionary, and listened to the older boys in the hall. “I got it from the Kanshi taikan,” some graduate student would say, and you made a mental note to ask a friend about the Kanshi taikan the next time you could be alone together. For all the limitations, it was a pleasant and reasonably effective way to learn Sinology. The atmosphere was clubby, the pace was slow, and there was usually time for patient professional attention.

The South Asian historian, often unaccustomed to the tools of other disciplines, has largely neglected his most massive primary source—the newspaper. A newspaper file is massive enough to distract researcher and librarian alike, but they should not be distracted. A newspaper by its very nature cannot exist in an ivory tower. Whether subsidized or self-supporting, it is a part of its society. It reflects that society and influences it—sometimes both—in an intellectual ricochet. This article will consider, first, the availability and identification of South Asian newspapers; second, what might be learned from them, and third, how it might be learned.

Recently this author found an original source for the study of the revolutionary movement in India prior to 1917. It is a Government of India publication: “No. 372,” Confidential, “Political Trouble in India 1907–1917” by James Campbell Ker.