志士와 文人, 정치와 문학 ―일본에서의 漢詩의 근대와 지식인

Abstract

This study is an analysis of the developmental phases and views of Chinese poetry, which was composed vigorously during the Meiji period. It sheds light on the significance of Meiji Chinese poetry in the history of Chinese-style poetry in Japan and seeks to reformulate the true nature of the intelligentsia of the time. The basic structure of modern Japan as a nation-state was completed during the Meiji period. In this time, there was an attempt to get rid of the Chinese universal order based on Chinese characters and literary Chinese by de-centering China(Jpn. Shina支那) as a foreign "other". In fact, however, there was a veritable deluge of Chinese-style poetry written during the Meiji period that penetrated into every nook and cranny of society. The formation of translation equivalents for the language of western civilization(words from western languages), kanbun kundokutai 漢文訓讀體, the official writing style of the Meiji period that was derived from the vocalization of literary Chinese, and the popularity of Chinese poetry are all examples of this. However, different than kanbun kundokutai and the reconstruction of translation language as symbols of cultural development based on function of Chinese characters, the popularity of Chinese poetry, accompanied by its adherence to authentic precedents and inordinate conventional limitations, brought the curtain down ending the Meiji period. Chinese poetry of the Meiji period, however, is not just an inheritance of the symbols of pre-modern mentality it is a function emerging from within the project of modernity at the very core of the Meiji Restoration. We can see that Chinese poetry, which had provided purely literary influences up until the end of the Edo period, was now strictly affiliated with politics and the relationship between Chinese poetry and government was newly reorganized. In other words, Meiji-period Chinese poetry, as a representative media, functioned as a mode of political criticism inside the space of official discourse. Politicians and people of the wealthy class consumed the power and authority of this high class genre through developed media. The appetite for modernization, however, was come to the creativity of the people through the homogenization of information by national power and Chinese poetry lost its function rapidly.