So, what is it about 1893?

Greetings and welcome to my second blog: there's something about 1893.

From one who was rather coy about the whole twitterverse/blogging thing less than a year ago, why am I starting up a second blog (actually, it's number 3; number 2 is still under wraps)? Regular readers of 'Psephy's~ologies' will know that I have a keen interest in what makes our society tick, politically, ethically, philosophically and so on. How can we make a better, more engaged society? Can we do politics better? Basically, I think we can but it will take some work. 

Over time, I've become interested in ideas about political culture especially in Australia and Japan, the foci of my main work as a political scientist. A few years ago, I got to thinking about a similarity in the apparent 'apathy' towards the polities of the two countries. For some reason, I got to backtracking to the idea of the 'social contract', after Rousseau and others. My contemporary work seeks to examine these notions of the social contract, where they came from and how the 'contract' is formed or understood. 

In 2010, I had the good fortune to spend some time in our National Library in Canberra. There, I was on a mission to discover what was written about Australia by Japanese people, predating World War 2, but with an open mind about what I might find. 

What I found was a richness of material that I'm still working through. Key among those documents was a series of writings, journals, reports and other reflections on Australia and the region. These were written largely by reasonably privileged males who were sent abroad by the Meiji Government to learn about the west and bring back ideas and examples of political, legal and educational institutions. Now while these 'Meiji adventurers' were largely well-documented for their exploits in Europe and the US, very little seems to have been made of the visitors to Australia. 

The most interesting characters, and their reports, appear to have been here in the latter part of the 19th century and the early 20th century. Their insights and observations about Australia are remarkable; the ideas they took back to Japan also significant. As I was thinking about my 'social contract' ideas, it struck me that these fellows were here in Australia in the very decades the new Australian nation was emerging--what if, then, the eternal academic question, what if some political ideas in Australia at the time filtered back to the emerging Japan of the time?  

And so this blog was born. In this space I'll be doing a couple of things. On the one hand, I'll be developing the propositions that there might have been some very interesting exchange of ideas going on at the time. The other main purpose is to translate some of those documents into English to get a sense of how Japan's ideas about Australia were conveyed at the turn of the 20th century...an earlier 'Australia in Asia' century. 

And so why 1893? It is a year that keeps recurring in these studies, and so I am curious--what was it about 1893? Chief among these recollections is the report written by Watanabe Kanjuro for the Japanese foreign minister at the time. Watanabe toured around Queensland and parts of what is now the Northern Territory taking in much about the living conditions of locals and Japanese migrants. Some of his photographic evidence is fascinating (and I hope to be able to reproduce some here) as is his noting of some indigenous words with Japanese translations. That is most exciting. He was here when Brisbane was inundated by floods too. There are other events which occurred in 1893 as well. 

Another noted Japanese migrant of the time was Sato Torajiro, resident mostly on Thursday Island and champion of the local Japanese pearl divers. He is somewhat more well-known, but his writings have some political significance as well. Both Watanabe and Sato returned to Japan to become members of the fledging Japanese parliament in the early 20th century...I look forward to tackling the Japanese equivalent of Hansard in due course. Did their Australian experiences influence their politics in any way? 

I have some work ahead but this will be most fascinating I think. It will tell us much about or history and much about our politics, then and now. Thus the focus of this blog will be much narrower than my other one, which allows me to wax at length on a range of topics. This one is related, I am an unreconstructed political nerd after all, but it will be mainly about the translations and the politics of another time. 

Japanese language of the 19th century is quite different from its modern cousin. Translations will be challenging, but the language geek in me looks forward to the challenge. I thank, in advance, the librarians of the National Library of Australia (NLA), the State Library of Queensland (slq) and the national parliamentary library of Japan, the Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan. This blog is a tribute to your help and encouragement and your care in cataloguing our past, such that we can know our present and understand our future.