China through the Other’s Eyes: Beijing in Two Meiji-Era Textbooks

Abstract

This study examines two Chinese-language textbooks published in late Meiji Japan, Kangwa Pekin Jijō and Shinago Kyōkasho: Pekin Fūdo-hen, in order to explore the relationship between language learning, social knowledge, and representations of China within modern Japan’s “practical Chinese” (jitsuyō Chūgokugo) education. While previous scholarship has extensively discussed the practical orientation of Meiji-period Chinese-language education, Beijing Mandarin, vocabulary, and the history of Chinese-language pedagogy, comparatively less attention has been paid to the role of Chinese-language textbooks in cross-cultural transmission. In particular, further investigation is needed into how such textbooks selected, organized, and transmitted knowledge of contemporary Chinese society to Japanese learners. Using close textual reading and comparative analysis, this study focuses on the selection of content, pedagogical organization, and representations of Beijing society in the two textbooks. The analysis shows that Pekin Jijō primarily employs a dialogic structure of “question–answer–follow-up question–explanation,” embedding knowledge of weather, roads, housing, commerce, marriage, and other aspects of social life within concrete everyday situations. Pekin Fūdo-hen, by contrast, organizes Beijing and the Chinese society it represents into relatively systematic fields of knowledge through thematic categories such as seasonal conditions, geography, administration, examinations, and commerce. Despite their different pedagogical approaches, both textbooks integrate language learning with social knowledge, transforming Beijing society into forms of knowledge that could be learned, understood, and applied in practice. The study further finds that the Beijing represented in these textbooks was not a direct reproduction of social reality, but a mediated image produced through processes of selection, classification, and explanation. Beijing is presented both as the political center of the Qing empire and as a contemporary urban society characterized by commercial activity, population mobility, social relationships, and everyday life, in which traditional institutions coexist with modern transportation, Western commodities, and foreign residents. In this sense, these textbooks provide a concrete micro-level perspective from which to examine how China in late Qing China and late Meiji Japan was understood and represented in Meiji Japan.