Competing for Supremacy: The Origins of Shakespeare Studies in Japan

Kohei Uchimaru

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.27.08

Authors

Kohei Uchimaru Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.27.08

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Keywords:

Shakespeare, Japan, Imperial University of Tokyo, Sôseki Natsume, Shôyô Tsubouchi, Yoshisaburô Okakura

Abstract

This paper reveals that Shakespeare studies in Japan originated through competing notions of literary studies. Traditional Japanese ideas about literature differed markedly from Anglophone ones, which focused on grammatical and literary-historical facts based on the notion of Shakespeare’s universal appeal. Their principles were contested by Sôseki Natsume, who questioned Shakespeare’s vaunted universality between the 1900s and the 1910s. Although specialist scholars began forming Shakespeare as an object of disinterested study in the 1920s, it was contested again by some reflective scholars who wished to employ Shakespeare as a means of liberal education. These contests for supremacy spawned divergent origins of Shakespeare studies in Japan.

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Author Biography

Kohei Uchimaru, Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan

is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Osaka Metropolitan University. His co-authored works include Shakespeare in East Asian Education (Palgrave, 2021), Shakespeare Society of Japan’s 60th Anniversary Collection of Essays (Kenkyusha, 2021), and Policies and Practice in Language Learning and Teaching: 20th-century Historical Perspectives (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). He also served as a co-convenor of the “Remembering War through Shakespeare” seminar at the 11th World Shakespeare Congress (2021).

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