Ichisada Miyazaki
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Miyazaki Ichisada (宮崎 市定 Miyazaki Ichisada?, August, 1901 – May 24, 1995) was a Japanese academic who was regarded as one of the leading figures in Sinology of the 20th century. Based at Kyoto University, Miyazaki gained notability in Japan, China, and the West for his wide scope and depth of knowledge and for his groundbreaking work spanning seven decades of active scholarship. His work on China covered its history from the beginning of civilisation until the revolution which deposed the monarchy in 1912.
Ichisada began his academic life at Kyoto University under the guidance of the renowned Naitō Konan, also later studying under Kano Naoki and Kuwabara Jitsuzō, and his name soon became an icon of the Kyoto school of Sinology. It was often said that Miyazaki completed the social and economic historical details for Naitō's celebrated thesis on the periodisation of Chinese history, identifying the start of modernity in the Northern Song. Much of Miyazaki's work was on the topic of the Song period and the wider historical impact of the changes in that era for Chinese history. He followed the core of Naito's periodization scheme, but expanded it by adding a fourth stage to "ancient", "medieval", and "modern": "recent" (saikinsei; literally, "most modern") beginning with the 1911 Revolution by Sun Yat-sen that abolished the monarchy of the Qing Dynasty and established the Republic of China. He further applied this process to Japanese and world history. Thus Miyazaki began an effort at comparative macrohistorical analysis. A handful of the topics with which he dealt in substantial articles include: local bureaucracy under the Song Dynasty, currency in the Five Dynasties and early Song eras, Wang Anshi's agricultural policies, a comparison of the "renaissance" in Europe and East Asia, the place of cremation in Chinese history, northern Chinese cities during the Six Dynasties, commoner lifestyle at the latter stage of the Han dynasty, shidafu and commoners in the Su-Song area during the Ming era, Prime Minister Jia Sidao of the Southern Song, the rebellion of Deng Maoqi, silver in "modern" (kinsei) China, literati styles in the Song, Tibet during the Song-Yuan period, coal and iron in the Song, judicial institutions of the Song and Yuan, the Tang-Song transition in farm labor, the life and times of Zhang Pu of the late Ming Dynasty, and evolution in the structure of population centers in Chinese history.
Miyazaki's research extended far beyond the Song, stretching from the beginning of Chinese civilisation into the Qing Dynasty, the last dynasty of China before the overthrow of the monarchy by a republic. His work extended farl beyond the borders of China. His first major work, published in 1950, was a volume on the Yongzheng Emperor of the Qing dynasty, Yoseitei. The book is still regarded as the most authoritative text on the topic among all languages. Although Miyazaki was best known in the Western Hemisphere for his work on the Chinese imperial examination system, Kakyo: Chūgoku no shiken jigoku (The Examination System: China's Examination Hell), translated into English by Conrad Schirokauer under the title China's Examination Hell, a book that was written for the general public in Japan, rather than academic readers. A more scholarly and in-depthd study of the Chinese mandarin elite was presented in his longer and more comprehensive tome, Kyūhinkanjinhō no kenkyū: Kakyo zenshi (Studies of the Regulations of the Nine Ranks Bureaucratic System: The Prehistory of the Examination System), which examined the Nine Ranks-Rectifier (jiupin zhongzheng) system of the Six Dynasties era.
Later in his career, Miyazaki began delving into ancient Chinese history, producing a new interpretation of the Analects of Confucius, Rongo no shin kenkyū and of the Shiji, such as his essay on the biography of Li Si. Some of the later papers were collated in Shiki o kataru (On the Shiji). In the 1970s and 1980s, he commenced a series of studies of ancient Japan. Miyazaki had a conviction that the scholars of the field had been inadequately trained in classical Chinese, which are regarded as the most important tool for investigating the subject, so Miyazaki focused his skills in that direction. He produced rereadings and new explanations of ancient sword inscriptions, stele inscriptions, and passages found by archaeologists and documented in the "Treatises on Japan" in the Wei zhi and other early Chinese texts depicting concerning Japan, as well as ancient Japanese language material. His writings were incorporated into a number of books, such as Nazo no shichishitō: Goseiki no Higashi Ajia to Nihon (The Seven-pointed Sword: East Asia and Japan in the Fifth Century) and Kodai Yamato chōtei (The Ancient Yamato Court). The conclusions proposed by Miyazaki have become and enduring part of the continuing debates concerning ancient Japanese history.
Although he spent the vast majority of his life Japan's ancient capital, Miyazaki was also a visiting scholar at Harvard and Hamburg Universities. While travelling' to France for a research period in 1936, he met the noted writer Yokomitsu Riichi and became the model for the historian who is depicted in Yokomitsu's novel, Ryoshū (The Loneliness of the Journey). Although various editions of his works have been published over the past five decades Iwanami shoten had only completed publication of a comprehensive Miyazaki Ichisada zenshū in twenty-five volumes in the early 1990s.
Miyazaki was known for saying little. His students feared him, leading the oft-articulated phrase that he was nicer to visiting scholars and overseas students. Many misinterpreted his attitude as a sign of arrogance.
[edit] References
- Fogel, Joshua A. (August 1996). "Obituary: Miyazaki Ichisada (1901–1995)". Journal of Asian Studies 55 (3): pp. 806–8.
