The Nationalism of Sensibility from the Viewpoint of Meiji Art and Literature: Sublime Land and Picturesque Landscape

Associate Professor Takako Morimoto, Department of Language and Culture, Shizuoka University, Japan, is exploring modern Japanese literature and Meiji landscape literature education to answer questions about the relationship between individuals and society. She is interested in how individuals relate to the times and society in which they are in and how they challenge the related constraints. She believes modern Japanese literature and Meiji landscape literature education may hold the answers. She is exploring nationalism in the Meiji period, during which time Shigetaka Shiga’s ‘Japanese Landscape Theory’ brought about a sense of nationalism that transformed into patriotic nationalism used to constrain people. A key part of Morimoto’s research is nationalism related to the ‘sublime-picturesque’ aesthetic found in the 18th and 19th centuries in Western Europe. The ‘sublime’ is a concept which originated in Edmund Burke’s 1757 book ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’. She has found that nationalism is not necessarily formed only from a national system consisting of laws and institutions, it is formed from the complementary relation between a national system and national sensitivity. She wants social sciences and humanities researchers to further explore this idea, prompting recognition of the complementary nature of the two fields. She wants her readings of Tōson’s ‘Hakai’ and Sōseki’s ‘Gubijinso’ to spark further academic conversations.