288 pp. May 2008
cloth
, ISBN 978-0-8248-2560-7, $58.00
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Keywords: |
Asia
Japan
history |
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Evaluating Evidence: A Positivist Approach to Reading Sources on Modern Japan
by George Akita
“In Evaluating Evidence, George Akita reasserts unabashedly the centrality of the written document in the work of the historian. At a time when postmodernism and deconstructionism have come to occupy the summit of methodological fashion in many disciplines, this distinguished chronicler of modern Japanese history insists that the positivistic tradition of research and scholarship remains crucial to any meaningful rendition of the past. Akita draws on decades-long experience collaborating with Japanese counterparts to collect, transcribe, and publish thousands of documents and records otherwise inaccessible to students of the past. While extolling document-based research, he also describes the problems of accuracy encountered when working closely with documents: potential distortions from the intervention of editorial hands in the selection of materials to be collected and published, reading errors, mistakes in transcription and dating, and typographical errors. But, as he writes in two separate chapters of breathtaking scope reviewing Western scholarship on modern Japan, such problems pale when compared to historians’ carelessness in manipulating documentary evidence, or inaccuracies resulting from efforts of even highly acclaimed researchers to bend the documentary record to fit preconceived notions of what the past ‘should’ be.” —Gordon Berger, University of Southern California
“This is a book full of passion. It is particularly concerned with reiterating the importance of archival research in the study of modern Japan. It is also a kind of personal summing up by one of America’s leading Japan scholars. The work intriguingly combines elements of methodology, historiography, and criticism. In a world increasingly dominated by theory and ideology, it reminds us of the importance of a positivist approach to our sources; of the need for circumspection and honesty. Akita believes that Clio speaks most clearly to those who immerse themselved deeply in her sources and who resist the temptation to bend them freely to their will. There is a bit of the Old Testament prophet in Akita. And he is prepared to take his ‘truths’ wherever they lead him. No doubt, some will feel the sting more than others.” —Fred G. Notehelfer, University of California, Los Angeles
Evaluating Evidence is based on the grueling lessons learned by a senior scholar during three decades of tutoring by, and collaboration with, Japanese historians. George Akita persisted in the difficult task of reading documentary sources in Japanese, most written in calligraphic style (sôsho), out of the conviction of their centrality to the historian’s craft and his commitment to a positivist methodology to research and scholarship. He argues forcefully in this volume for an inductive process in which the scholar seeks out facts on a subject and, through observation and examination of an extensive body of data, is able to discern patterns until it is possible to formulate certain propositions.
In his introduction, Akita relates how and why he decided to adopt a positivist approach and explains what he means by the term as it applies to humanistic studies. He enumerates the difficulties linked with reading primary sources in Japanese by looking at a variety of unpublished and published materials and identifying a major problem in reading published primary sources: the intervention of editors and compilers. He illustrates the pitfalls of such intervention by comparing the recently published seventeen-volume diary of Prime Minister Hara Takashi (1856–1921), a photo reproduction of the diary in Hara’s own hand, and an earlier published version. Using documents related to Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922), a figure of central importance in Japan’s post-Restoration political history, he demonstrates the use of published and transcribed primary sources to sustain, question, or strengthen some of the themes and approaches adopted by non-Japanese scholars working on modern Japanese history. He ends his inquiry with two “case studies,” examining closely the methods of the highly acclaimed American historians John W. Dower and Herbert P. Bix.
George Akita is professor emeritus in the Department of History, University of Hawai‘i.
Read the introduction (PDF).
table of contents
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