NOTA |
(★)(1.On February 11, 1889, as all Tokyo prepared to celebrate the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution, an assassin´s blade brought to an end the life of Mori Arinori, Japanese minister of education. Mori had been a symbol to Japanese and Westerners alike of his country´s rapid, yet often painful, strides toward modernization. He was a maverick among the modernizing leaders of Meiji Japan as evidenced by even a few of his many pioneering accomplishments : as first diplomatic envoy to America, as founder of Japan´s first modern philosophical society and her first commercial college, as the first to marry in the Western fashion, and as the first education minister under the new cabinet system. Yet who was the real Mori? In the period following the assassination, the reactions covered the extremes. The Japan Weekly Mail hailed Mori as ´one of the ablest statesmen and most brilliant scholars in Japan´ while other press accounts eulogized the assassin. 2.Ivan Parker Hall, Tokyo correspondent for the Philadelphia Bulletin, examines new and controversial materials from the United States, Great Britain, and Japan to probe Mori´s true identity. He shows how the statesman has been thought of as Westernizer or nationalist resulting in four images : Westernizer Commendable, Westernizer Reprehensible, Nationalist Commendable, and Nationalist Reprehensible. Mr. Hall goes behind the stereotypes to delineate a career which exemplified in many ways the energy, flexibility and vision which enabled the Japanese to modernize quickly and on their own terms, sparing themselves both the colonial subjugation of India and the revolutionary paroxysm of China.) |