Convergence or Coevolution? Ishikawa Chiyomatsu and the Problem of Japanese Modernization

Japan, the biologist Ishikawa Chiyomatsu argued in his 1929 text on The History of Living Things, was a puzzle. No other nation had achieved what the Japanese had achieved with such alacrity: “We are the only civilized nation in the Orient,” he wrote. “At this pace we will soon match the great powers of the West.” Ishikawa was born in 1861, and he was a firsthand witness to Japan’s transformation out of feudalism to triumph over the Chinese and Russians in war and match European nations in economic terms. Japan was the world’s first non-Western imperial and industrial power, and those developments had occurred with stunning speed. “Our society has experienced such change in just three human generations,” Ishikawa noted. But the real puzzle was not the fact of rapid change. It was how to explain it. Ishikawa was among Japan’s most prominent advocates of Darwinism and social evolutionary thinking, and he sought to comprehend his country’s rise using evolutionary principles. Was “strong Japan” a result of autochthonous dynamics nurtured during the “feudal isolation” of the Tokugawa era (1603-1868)? If so, it was best explained as an instance of “convergent evolution,” the development of analogous structures (a society capable of matching those found in the “civilized nations” of the West) in distinct environments. Or was Japan’s modernization the result of borrowing and copying, a social “coevolution,” to borrow another of Darwin’s ideas, that emerged through engagement with the West? This presentation takes Ishikawa’s puzzle as a starting point for addressing the historical relationship between biological analysis and historical thinking in the study of Japan and as a prompt to foreground the ethical dimensions of the ongoing return to biology in the humanities. In the process we will explore the oftentimes unrecognized homologies between these two ways of thinking.