"A serious effort [that] ... reopens the questions of cross-cultural perceptions and the way in which ideas are transmitted and bounded by the environments and cultures that produced and adopted them" --Journal of Japanese Studies 29 (2003)

"Covering an impressive range of texts and writers, this is a work of solid scholarship ... a key text on Meiji Japan" --Japanese Studies, September 2005

"Howland's reading of establishment writers is careful and thorough ... What is more, the themes that unify this work are perceptive and important. He shows a remarkable affinity between the tutelage-oriented elitism of British liberals and Tokugawa enlighteners that says much about the dominance of statism in Meiji debates. He shows the emperor ideology inhibiting democratic ideas. He shows how the threat of Western imperialism led even progressives to define rights, society, and liberty in a way that favored state over people." --American Historical Review, April 2003

In this rich and absorbing analysis of the transformation of political thought in nineteenth-century Japan, Douglas Howland examines the transmission to Japan of key concepts--liberty, rights, sovereignty, and society--from Western Europe and the United States. Because Western political concepts did not translate well into their language, Japanese had to invent terminology to engage Western political thought. This work of westernization served to structure historical agency as Japanese leaders undertook the creation of a modern state.

Where scholars have previously treated the introduction of Western political thought to Japan as a simple migration of ideas from one culture to another, Howland undertakes an unprecedented integration of the history of political concepts and the semiotics of translation techniques. He demonstrates that Japanese efforts to translate the West must be understood as problems both of language and action--as the creation and circulation of new concepts and the usage of these new concepts in debates about the programs and policies to be implemented in a westernizing Japan.

Translating the West will interest scholars of East Asian studies and translation studies and historians of political thought, liberalism, and modernity.

Douglas R. Howland is associate professor of history at DePaul University.

Read the introduction (PDF).

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