Reconsidering the notion of “Rankean historiography” in Japan

This essay does not attempt to draw a complete picture of Ranke in Japan. Its starting point is a curious disparity: while Euro-American surveys of Japanese history writing in the nineteenth century have made strong claims about the impact of Rankean historiography, so far no attempt has been made to corroborate a substantial intellectual link between Ranke and Japanese historians. This introductory section discusses evidence that casts doubt on the presence of such a substantial link and introduces the particularities of the “Rankean moment” as an opportunity to rethink the notion of Rankean historiography through the lens of the scholarly persona.

What are meant by “substantial” here are the usual signs of intellectual engagement: first and foremost written output by historians reflecting on or influenced by Ranke's ideas and scholarship, attention to a variety of his publications and aspects of his work, translations and editions of his publications, and a sustained dialogue after initial contact. In post-1887 Japan, the year that is given as a starting date for Rankean historiography in Japan in the literature, none of these ingredients are present.

Euro-American accounts have asserted for decades that Ranke's methods were introduced to the archipelago by his disciple Ludwig Riess (1861–1928), who served as professor of Western history at the Imperial University in Tokyo from 1887 to 1902.Footnote ⁷ The impact, we are told even in such recent accounts as Daniel Woolf's magisterial “Global History of History,” was dramatic: “Any residual Chinese traditional influences on historiography were soon overwhelmed by Western scholarship … Germany became the admired model.”Footnote ⁸ Yet, given the fact that Rankean thought is said to have entered Japan through Riess, it is remarkable how Riess is clearly of no intrinsic interest in these accounts. He is rarely introduced without the epithet “a disciple of Ranke,” even though he had no more than a supporting role as scribe in the production of Ranke's late magnum opus on world history and supposedly conversed directly with the master only on two occasions.Footnote ⁹ More often than not, Riess's name is even misspelled or his relation to Ranke otherwise misrepresented.Footnote ¹⁰ In other words, the emphasis is clearly on Ranke, not on Riess.

Moreover, even a cursory review proves Ranke to be of much less concern to Riess's work in Tokyo than these accounts suggest. We know that Riess patterned his first lecture on world history after the structure of Ranke's eponymous magnum opus and continued to give the intermittent Ranke-related class.Footnote ¹¹ The notes to his lecture on the methodology of history give examples from Ranke's work, alongside that of numerous other historians from Johann Gustav Droysen and Henry Hallam to Bernard de Fontenelle.Footnote ¹² And one of Riess's students, Murakawa Kengo (1875–1946), later claimed that he “most enjoyed reading Ranke, adored his method of study, frequently quoted Ranke's works in his lectures and exercises at the university and thereby let us students appreciate Ranke's great historical knowledge.”Footnote ¹³ Likely, then, his students in Western, i.e. European and American, history in the 1890s were exposed to Ranke's name and status as an eminent historian in Europe, and perhaps also to some methodological principles and topics of his major works.

Yet, in Riess's publications and exchanges with his Japanese colleagues, Ranke barely featured at all. In his first contribution to the newly established Japanese Historical Journal in 1890, he duly invoked him as a “great authority,” but without giving further details.Footnote ¹⁴ In a biographical article for the Historical Journal six years later, Riess commemorated Ranke's successor at the university in Berlin, Heinrich von Treitschke, who had passed away earlier that year; he never penned a comparable article on Ranke.Footnote ¹⁵ In 1901, right in the middle of the Rankean moment, in a letter to his former teacher, Hans Delbrück, in Berlin, he even openly mocked the notion of a Rankean school of historiography proposed by German historians Kurt Breysig and Karl Lamprecht as a “fairytale.”Footnote ¹⁶

What this suggests is that Riess should perhaps only be called a “Rankean” in the sense that he had studied in Berlin under Ranke's successors, who “continued the tradition” of “historical methods taught by Ranke.”Footnote ¹⁷ This, however, is precisely the kind of ascription that blurs the distinction between Ranke's research and methodology and Ranke as a persona which is at issue here. For good reason, then, Japanese accounts, while giving full credit to Riess's presence, are much more hesitant to mention Ranke's name, much less assert a transformative Rankean impact on Japanese historiography.Footnote ¹⁸

If many of the survey articles are rather indifferent about Riess, they show even less concern for the Japanese scholars that supposedly embraced Ranke: Riess's colleagues at the Imperial University, Tsuboi Kumezō (1858–1936) and Mitsukuri Genpachi (1862–1919), who were of roughly the same age and had both also studied in Germany, are hardly ever mentioned in survey texts.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1894, Tsuboi, lecturer in history since 1886 and Riess's colleague in the department of Western history since 1891, situated Ranke in an essay “On History” at the starting point of “pure [scientific] history” but did not explicate this theme any further.Footnote ²⁰ This is the only context in which either of them mentioned Ranke before around the year 1900.

Despite the alleged paradigm shift and Riess's invocations, it took Japanese historians quite some time to develop a more than passing interest in Ranke. When it finally materialized, Riess's tenure was already in its twelfth year and scholars had been studying various strands of Euro-American historiography for several decades. It was only around 1900 that Ranke rather abruptly acquired the status of a celebrity. Within the short span of four years, a heightened interest welled up in different venues of the emerging academic discipline. The flagship Historical Journal opened with a photographic portrait and a fervent eulogy, Japanese historians wrote articles on his method, and students of the Imperial University organized a symposium commemorating his life and achievements.

This phenomenon shall be called a “Rankean moment” here, for two reasons. First, it was intellectually circumscribed in the sense that it was mostly based on a rather superficial familiarity with Ranke's thought and oeuvre: statements about Ranke's stature in Germany and Europe known to and eventually reproduced by Tsuboi, Riess and Mitsukuri, and references to the first lecture of Ranke's “On the Epochs of Modern History” and the preface written by his publisher, Alfred Dove. Second, it ended as abruptly as it began. Only after a considerable hiatus were further articles on Ranke's thought and the first Japanese translation of one of his works published.Footnote ²¹ The most significant contribution on Ranke's thought before 1945, Kyoto University historian Suzuki Shigetaka's treatise on Ranke's view of world history, published roughly four decades later, did not even acknowledge the discussions of the Rankean moment, even though these were centrally concerned with Ranke as a world historian.Footnote ²²

While both the lack of evidence for previous engagement and the nature of the Rankean moment are hard to reconcile with earlier accounts of Ranke's impact in Japan, the notion of the scholarly persona offers a different explanation. By shifting the focus away from intellectual lineages and towards models of scholarly virtue, it allows us to conceptualize the Rankean moment as a culmination of the search for models of the good historian that had occupied Japanese scholars since the late 1870s.

The transformation of historical scholarship and the search for models

Even before Ludwig Riess arrived in Tokyo, history writing in Japan had long been a “crowded discursive field.”Footnote ²³ Already the last decades of the 1700s saw a surging interest in national history, an import of new methodologies of evidential scholarship from China, and an intensification of what might be termed Western area studies.Footnote ²⁴ In the mid-nineteenth century, history became a means to make sense of the escalating internal and external political crisis and discuss the future form of the Japanese polity.Footnote ²⁵ With the opening of the ports after 1854, Japanese intellectuals intensified their studies and translation efforts of Western historical works. They were especially intrigued by the civilizational histories in the style of François Guizot and Henry Thomas Buckle, as the idea of the progress of civilization afforded them a new understanding of Japan's political trajectory and place in the world.Footnote ²⁶ While not historical writing per se, Herbert Spencer's publications and his social Darwinist views of human development were also widely absorbed by Japanese intellectuals.Footnote ²⁷

The broader cultural and political changes of the Meiji period (1868–1912) shook up received notions of the purpose of history writing and its position in the wider field of scholarship. On the institutional level, history had not been a clearly delineated field of learning in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868)—boundaries between history and philology, literature, morality and politics were often vague. At the forerunner of the Imperial University in Tokyo, for example, history was taught as part of the English, law and philosophy curricula as well as in courses in Japanese and Chinese classics. Dedicated historical departments were only set up from the late 1880s: the History Department, where Ludwig Riess was appointed first professor, was created in 1887; the Historiographical Office, which had been tasked with an official dynastic history by the Meiji government, was attached to the university as the Historiographical Institute in 1889, with a dedicated department for national history being added the following year and a unit for history and geography, which in practice focused on European and American history, in 1891; Chinese history was formally separated from literature and language studies even later, in the years between 1897 and 1910, when it merged into the department for oriental history.Footnote ²⁸

The new institutional frameworks engendered by the extensive reform programs of the Meiji government made it necessary to reflect on new models of scholarship. Scholars who had been socialized to follow the model of the Confucian scholar-official, the dominant persona of the Tokugawa period, were abruptly turned into professional historians working in the context of university departments based on notions of academic disciplines that had not previously existed in this form in Japan.Footnote ²⁹ How to fill out the new institutional role of the professional academic historian consequently became a central task for this generation of scholars.

One early attempt to find new models was carried out by the Historiographical Office. In 1879, it commissioned the Hungarian scholar Gustav Zerffi to produce a survey of European historiographical traditions.Footnote ³⁰ His instructions were couched in a language of traits and virtues that is a key feature of scholarly personae: to state “the personal qualifications necessary in a historian”; to “enumerate those great authors who, by the common consent of mankind, have realized the ideal of what a Historian should be; and show, how the Historian of the present day should familiarize himself with the principles which guided them, and with the methods which they followed, if he himself too should desire to attain similar excellence.” Zerffi was explicitly told to “enumerate and criticize the greatest modern Historians, whether English, French, or German &c.”Footnote ³¹ And so he did, allotting about a 150 pages to the recent centuries of European historiography. Ranke appeared only in passing, in a row with other influential German historians such as Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Theodor Mommsen and Heinrich von Sybel.Footnote ³² The result did not turn out to be what the institute expected, however, as Zerffi had focused on the philosophy of history and ancient Greek authors at the expense of contemporary standards and exemplars of the discipline, and ended up having only limited impact on subsequent debates.Footnote ³³

Such debates proliferated in the following years, as the new class of professional academic historians attempted to define their role and purpose, discussing scholarly virtues like impartiality, diligent textual criticism or the emancipation of history from Confucian notions of morality.Footnote ³⁴ As these discussions were centrally about professional disciplinary virtues in history writing, they were led freely across the emerging, but still vague, geographical subfields of national, Western and oriental history, as evidenced by the term akademizumu (“academism”) that Japanese historians retroactively applied to the mainstream of academic pre-World War II history.Footnote ³⁵

Concurrently with the establishment of an academic historiography, there emerged a group of popular history writers, often called Min'yūsha historians after the platform and publishing house of the same name, who consciously defined the purpose of history in opposition to the new disciplinary standards. Just as academic historians employed virtue language to distinguish “‘professionals’ from ‘amateurs’” and discredit the latter as “pseudo-historians,”Footnote ³⁶ these writers attacked their academic counterparts for having traded vitality and relevance for rigor and accuracy in their pursuit of historical facts.Footnote ³⁷ Instead they cherished Buckle, Guizot and Spencer and their notions of “laws” and “principles” in history.Footnote ³⁸ As with these authors, history for the Min'yūsha historians linked up with politics as they construed such laws to guide societies along a historical path to ever greater freedom and progress.

It is not surprising, then, that they found a model of the exemplary historian in the British politician and paradigmatic Whig historian Thomas Macaulay (1800–59). The popular history journal Shikai featured a biographical sketch of Macaulay in 1892, and one of the Min'yūsha historians, Takekoshi Yosaburō, published a longer stand-alone biography a year later.Footnote ³⁹ For Takekoshi, the most outstanding virtues of Macaulay were his lively and absorbing narrative style and the fact that he brought to bear his insight as a statesman on his writing.Footnote ⁴⁰ The opposition between academic and popular approaches to history writing around 1890 is mirrored in the way their respective proponents discussed scholarly virtues: while the Min'yūsha writers favored biography and a persona based on an individual historian, the academic historians at that time preferred theoretical reflection on abstract virtues. It was only once the new institutional forms had taken root, around the turn of the century, that academic historians unexpectedly discovered a comparable human vessel that could personify the ideal constellation of virtues that they had been pursuing—in Leopold von Ranke.

Ranke's virtues

The kickoff for the Rankean moment in Japan was a set of articles in the Historical Journal. This journal was published by the Historiographical Society, which was founded in 1889 as a professional organization for academic historiography on the initiative of Ludwig Riess and his colleague at the Historiographical Institute Shigeno Yasutsugu (1827–1910).Footnote ⁴¹ For the January 1899 issue, Murakawa Kengo, a recent graduate and at that time editor of the journal, planned to feature a portrait of Ranke as part of the front matter (Fig. 1) and requested that Riess write an appraisal to supplement the photograph. Riess's contribution is a useful case study for the construction of a scholarly persona: instead of sketching out Ranke's life and career or summarizing his most influential works, it condenses him into a list of generalizable character traits and accomplishments. Priming his readers for such an approach, Riess declared that “the worth of a historian resides in various dispositions” and then familiarized them with Ranke's unprecedented range of beneficial scholarly dispositions, the presence of which warranted, in Riess's eyes, the epithets “easily the best” and “the greatest historian of all times.”Footnote ⁴² Riess's manner of presentation was to introduce a general category—a scholarly virtue—and show how Ranke embodied it with bravura, an illustration of the metonymical move by which the traits of an individual can be abstracted into a persona. These are the eight virtues that Riess enumerated:

1. 1 the discovery and systematical use of new sources,

2. 2 methodical source criticism,

3. 3 the development of an interpretation based on the sources,

4. 4 an adeptness at lively written portrayal,

5. 5 a wide range of research topics,

6. 6 the ability to write about contemporary history,

7. 7 an excellent command of prose writing and

8. 8 the ability to explain the advancement of civilization.

What is noteworthy here is that an aspect that played a major role in European and American discussions of Ranke's virtues and is still associated with his name today is absent: his aspiration to objectivity and impartiality. In contrast, the ability to write about current events and to explain the advancement of civilization are two dispositions not commonly encountered in Western accounts of Ranke's qualities. In part, these priorities seem to be based in Riess's personal notions of the skillful historian: his explanation of Ranke's “wide range of research topics” in terms of geographical breadth betrayed his personal inclination towards universal and world history.Footnote ⁴³

Fig. 1.

A portrait of Leopold von Ranke around his ninetieth birthday, reprinted in Shigaku zasshi 10/1 (1899).

At any rate, Riess's version of Ranke's virtues resonated with his Japanese audience. Contemporary relevance and explanatory power in the realm of the global race for civilization were two core concerns of Japanese historiography in the late nineteenth century. The analysis of civilizational progress in a global framework to understand and advance Japan's place in the world had been a central challenge for the civilizational histories prominent in the 1870s and 1880s and continued to inform the outlook and priorities (if not the narrative forms) of state-funded academic historiography in the 1890s.Footnote ⁴⁴ The short eulogy was thus a first step towards a Rankean persona retrofitted for Japanese purposes.

It is fortunate for our understanding of Ranke's place in late Meiji Japan that, later that year, the Historical Journal also published the first contribution by a Japanese scholar on Ranke to complement Riess's eulogy: Mitsukuri Genpachi's short article on “Ranke's Method of Historical Research.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Mitsukuri, who was nearly the same age as Riess, had studied in Tübingen (where he also received his doctorate), Heidelberg and Berlin between 1885 and 1892. Upon his return to Japan, he was appointed professor at the Tokyo Higher Normal School and taught classes in Western history at Tokyo Imperial University before replacing Riess as professor of Western history in 1902.Footnote ⁴⁶ Mitsukuri's article demonstrates that he was well versed in the currents of German historiography: he pointed out Ranke's indebtedness to Barthold Georg Niebuhr, and gave the original terms for Ranke's methods and two extensive quotes in German—one of them, by Ottokar Lorenz, with misspellings and grammatical errors (“Immer und überall erscheint uns Ranke wie der König der Histriographie”), but Mitsukuri seemingly was the only one with sufficient knowledge of German at the time, as the editors failed to notice. His familiarity with Ranke likely stemmed from his association with Max Lenz, since 1890 professor in Berlin, who had styled himself an “epigone of Ranke” and “Neo-Rankian.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Following a taxonomy directly taken from Alfred Dove's preface to Ranke's “On the Epochs of Modern History,” Mitsukuri first sketched three methodological principles employed by Ranke—the antiquarian, combining and philosophical methods—and stressed his accomplishments in all of them.Footnote ⁴⁸ He then praised Ranke's imagination, quoting Max Lenz, who had compared his literary qualities to those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. At first glance, it thus seems as if Mitsukuri rehearsed in more detail the points already present in Riess's eulogy. Half of the article, however, was devoted to an aspect of Ranke's work that was, and is still today, rarely seen as one of his major contributions to the historical discipline: his unfinished multivolume world history.Footnote ⁴⁹ Quoting from Ranke's lectures for the Bavarian king Maximilian, Mitsukuri eschewed the well-known historicist credo that “every age is next to God.” Instead he emphasized a part where Ranke, while conceding that he could never surpass the greatness of Thucydides and the ancients, was hopeful that he could achieve “something else”—for the reason that “our history flows more profoundly than theirs, because we seek to draw other potencies into history that encompasses the life of all nations, in a word, because we seek to grasp history as a unity.” This is what Mitsukuri took to be the essence of Ranke's “philosophical method”: “to understand the history of the world as a unity and take a broad overview from the whole … In other words, it is the ultimate goal of the historian to learn the actual conditions of how and in which direction mankind has been progressing.”Footnote ⁵⁰

It is quite obvious that this idea of progress and the development of civilization, while mirroring two of the virtues mentioned by Riess, is not in Ranke's original text. In fact, it directly contradicted Ranke's convictions as explicated in the very treatise Mitsukuri was quoting. Ranke was unambiguous about his rejection of the idea of historical progress, declaring it an “empty claim.”Footnote ⁵¹ Still, as explained above, the notion that the contemporary world was marked by a competition for the highest standard of civilization, rooted in the concrete experience of Western imperialism, had been fundamental to the worldview of Japanese intellectuals for several decades. History, among other things, had to serve the role of explaining the origins of the contemporary world and the state of global politics. To be able to do so, it needed a universal purview.

We can trace back how Mitsukuri read this idea into the original text through his Japanese translation of the German quote. “Because our history flows more profoundly,” originally a question of intensity, turns into “because the area of our history is wider than that of the ancients,” a statement of greater geographical expanse.Footnote ⁵² This, again, echoed Riess's eulogy, which had stressed the geographical breadth of Ranke's research. Mitsukuri turned this global perspective into a scholarly virtue by linking it to the analytical pretensions of history as a science, in the wider nineteenth-century sense of the word. The claim to universal applicability and explanatory power had made the idea of science attractive to Japanese scholars, as it matched their new experience of the world as a global totality and promised a method to comprehend it. This is one of the recurring themes in Japanese discussions of science in this period, and history, too, had to comply with this standard.Footnote ⁵³ For Mitsukuri, to inhabit a global perspective like Ranke was an essential ingredient for a scientific approach to history and thus a good every historian should strive after: “No matter how minute a historical fact we might be investigating, not for a single moment must we forget to keep this big picture in mind. To the extent that we fail to do so and research historical facts as individual things, history cannot enter the sphere of science.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Fascinatingly, Mitsukuri had already made the case for global history three years earlier in remarkably similar words, without connection to Ranke, in a speech at the Japanese Conference for Education:

This confirms that Mitsukuri had identified a global perspective as an epistemic virtue first and only later came to see Ranke as an embodiment of this virtue.

It is crucial to take note of this Japanized version of the Ranke persona both from a conceptual interest in the scholarly persona and from an interest in the global history of historiography. On the one hand, Riess's and Mitsukuri's views of Ranke demonstrate the malleability of virtues: even though they were derived from a concrete historian, many different interpretations were possible. They also serve to highlight how Ranke's image and virtues, which according to the established narrative radiated outward to a Japanese audience from Germany, were in fact from the beginning filtered through a Japanese worldview.

Criticism at the Ranke Festival

The confidence of Japanese scholars vis-à-vis Ranke was even more apparent in the “Ranke Festival” that took place on 20 December 1903 at Tokyo Imperial University in celebration of Ranke's 108th birthday. The festival started at one o'clock in the afternoon with a succession of commemorative speeches and was followed by a relaxed get-together with food and drinks that continued into the evening.Footnote ⁵⁶ Among the fifty-nine participants there were many students and young scholars such as Murakawa Kengo, but also the professors of the department, Mitsukuri and Tsuboi.

A day of speeches and fond recollection of the great master's achievements in the shadow of his portrait, below which “many dozen volumes of his peerless masterpieces were arranged” and which was fittingly “decorated with two twigs of laurel” on top and chrysanthemums and “traditionally Japanese bonsai” in frontFootnote ⁵⁷: at first glance, the festival suggests that Japanese historians had finally become infected by the “typically German fervor of hero worship.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This was certainly the impression gained by the German ambassador to Japan when he heard of the event. “I thank you, esteemed professor,” he wrote to the organizer, Takakuwa Komakichi, “for this honorable commemoration of the German historian and master of historical criticism. I will see to it that this interesting and touching scholarly congregation will also be taken note of in my home country.”Footnote ⁵⁹

A closer examination reveals that the festival had a more substantial agenda. For all the good-willed commemoration that took place, the speeches that were given on the occasion were far from uncritical. The introductory speech by Takakuwa set the tone for the gathering and defined the task of Japanese historians. Since Ranke,

The language here is illuminating. For Takakuwa to say that Ranke “has recently become” a founding father clearly demonstrates that he spoke as an observer of global historiographical trends and of the growing stock value of the Rankean persona. Tsuboi and Mitsukuri, with their extensive experience as students at German universities, had no trouble situating themselves in German debates about Rankean scholarship on the virtuousness of impartiality or the primacy of foreign policy.Footnote ⁶¹ What is in evidence here is a mature historiographical tradition that participated in a global conversation on the state of the discipline and did not shy away from critically appraising its great icon. In discussing Ranke's persona, the speakers at the festival simultaneously, or even primarily, negotiated the virtues that were to have relevance for their own academic community.

In the longer speech that followed, Takakuwa then introduced Ranke's biography. He also evaluated his achievements, rehearsing many familiar aspects of Ranke's life and impact: his publications, his role in the education of the next generation, the scientific accuracy of his method of criticism and, perhaps unavoidably, even a quote of “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” On the other hand, there were also tendencies in Ranke that Takakuwa found “hard to agree with”: his theories often “reeked of religion,” and he focused too much on modern history and politics to the detriment of economic and social factors.Footnote ⁶²

The following speakers were even blunter in their criticism. Abe Hidesuke (1876–1925), who had just graduated from the department and was to become an economic historian at Keiō University soon after, declared, “There must be many who approach the reader still more vigorously. There must be many who have a deeper knowledge of politics, religion and philosophy. And there are certainly scholars endowed with more freshness and originality of ideas.”Footnote ⁶³ Tsuboi, too, was outspoken about the aspects of Ranke's dispositions that he saw as unfit for his own self-fashioning: “As a nationalist, I do not worship the great-man theory. As someone who believes in facts, I do not rejoice in mysticism. As an economist, I am not convinced by inspiration theory. As these are points where Ranke's and my convictions diverge, I state them here at the outset.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Finally Mitsukuri: “I am truly an admirer of Ranke. (Applause). But—I am certainly not a blind follower. (Big applause).”Footnote ⁶⁵

All these points of criticism aside, what the participants agreed on as Ranke's greatest virtue was once more his global outlook. Again Abe:

Mitsukuri, too, closed his speech with an acclamation of “Ranke's sharp mind—in particular his ‘weltlich’ (global) perspective.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This association with a global historical perspective became a fixed element in Ranke's Japanese persona. Fifteen years later, his lectures for the Bavarian king Maximilian II, in German known as “Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte” (“On the Periods of Recent History”), tellingly became “Lectures on the Theory of World History” in Murakawa Kengo's Japanese translation.Footnote ⁶⁸

Ironically, Ranke himself had not been convinced that Asian civilizations had much to contribute to recent world history, opining in said lectures that “the most ancient epoch of Asian culture was the most efflorescent … With the invasion of the barbarians—the Mongols—culture came to an end.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Still, Japanese historians chose to overlook his Eurocentrism, like Mitsukuri, who blamed it on his later interpreters; or they sequestered aspects of his personality as historically and geographically contingent, while choosing others as meaningful virtues for their own circumstances.Footnote ⁷⁰

Ranke's visual persona

When we speak, as Georg Iggers did, of the circulation of Ranke's “image,” it makes sense also to reflect on visual incarnations of Ranke's persona. It was mentioned earlier that the initial motivation for Murakawa Kengo to request a eulogy from Ludwig Riess was a photograph of Ranke that he planned to publish in the Historical Journal (Fig. 1). The portrait in question is dated 1885 and was probably taken around Ranke's ninetieth birthday. Ranke's gaunt face framed by a long beard, his dressing gown and sunken posture in an armchair, create the impression either of a senescent sage and grand master or of a scholar long past his prime. The same portrait resurfaces five years later as the frontispiece of the commemorative pamphlet for the Ranke festival. An illustrated supplement for a “Textbook on Western History” in the same period featured a second, similar portrait.Footnote ⁷¹ Here, too, we see Ranke as an old man, with the same dressing gown, but in a more upright posture, his hair more carefully groomed—the xylography of a photograph taken around his eightieth birthday. This portrait had also appeared in Mitsukuri Genpachi's textbook Survey of Western History of 1899, with a caption introducing him as a “great authority among historians.”Footnote ⁷²

The popularity of these two old-age portraits raises an intriguing question: why these? Why not a reproduction of the well-known state-sanctioned oil painting created by Julius Friedrich Anton Schrader in 1868? Availability might have been an issue, but it is hard to imagine that a reprint of his official portrait or one of its copies should have been harder to come by than these old-age photographs. In fact, the portrait displayed at the Ranke festival is described in the pamphlet as an “oil painting,” not a photograph, which suggests that the audience looked at a version of the Schrader painting.Footnote ⁷³ We also encounter a version of the Schrader painting in later translations of Ranke's works, in both the “Lectures on World History” and the “Modern History of Europe.”Footnote ⁷⁴

A possible reason for the popularity of the octo- and nonagenarian portraits is given by Falko Schnicke. His close analysis of portraits of Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen and Theodor Mommsen reveals how they “produced and conveyed statements on the legitimate subject of historiographical research”; in other words, how they contributed to the construction of a “scientific persona.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Schnicke is primarily concerned with the encoding of the emerging discipline as male, an observation that is doubtlessly as applicable in Japan as it is in Germany.Footnote ⁷⁶ What is more pertinent here, however, is Schnicke's point that the paintings styled Ranke (and even more so Mommsen and Droysen) as modern, bourgeois, professional Prussian academics.Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet what was intended to endow the picture with universal authority from a German perspective must have parsed as specifically German for Japanese viewers. As the Schrader painting anchored Ranke as an individual in a specific time and place, it is easy to imagine why publishers found it a good fit for the Japanese translations of his works. But the Prussian medal worn by Ranke, his mid-century academic attire and the classicist interior of the room were possibly too specific and individualizing to project scholarly virtues into it that were to have validity in Japan thirty years onwards.

A British journalist who visited von Ranke on his ninetieth birthday made a remark on the distance between the painting and the man he had encountered that points in a similar direction:

In the eyes of the journalist, Ranke is reflected less as an individual than, again, a type or scholarly persona: that of the medieval philosopher. The piece thus suggests that Ranke's appearance in the old-age photograph, with its lack of clearly definable cultural or national signifiers, transcended time and space. It seems reasonable, then, that this is also what made it readily adoptable in the context of turn-of-the-century Japan.

The photographs and paintings can also be read against the traditions of Japanese painting.Footnote ⁷⁹ In Germany, the curators of the National Gallery in Berlin had been toying with the idea of ordering a portrait of Ranke long before they were bequeathed the Schrader portrait by him, but ultimately decided to put this idea to rest due to Ranke's deteriorating bodily condition. They were anxious to avoid projecting an image of the great master as frail and aging.Footnote ⁸⁰ In Japan, in contrast, a cultural uneasiness tended to surround the idea of painting sitters at too young an age, while too close a likeness could be construed as disrespectful. Most portraits up until the late Edo period (1600–1868), when a handful of literati began to experiment with Western-style painting techniques, consequently had a rather generic quality to them and were often even painted after the person in question had passed away.Footnote ⁸¹ Despite being photographs, the old-age portraits of Ranke also exhibit this generic aspect, due to the limits of the technology and the blurred or fading background.

There are also some differences from typical early modern Japanese scholarly portraits concerning the posture and attributes of the sitter. While the books in the background as markers of erudition were a familiar trope in traditional paintings, and the plain robe matched the plain attire of many Japanese scholars, both the chair and the beard were more common in the Chinese tradition. Chinese scholars, most famously Confucius, were depicted sporting a beard, and they also stood or sat in chairs more often than their Japanese counterparts.Footnote ⁸² This tradition had become popular in the eighteenth century thanks to the works of, among others, Yi Lu (1611–c.1680), which extended a strong influence on Japanese literati art and self-fashioning.Footnote ⁸³ The old-age Ranke portrait bore striking similarities in this regard to photographic portraits of Japanese scholars like the literati painter Tomioka Tessai (1836–1924), who carried on this tradition into the late nineteenth century.

Regardless of whether the Japanese historians contributing to the Rankean moment had the full range of portraits to choose from, the prominence of visual portrayals in discussions of Ranke is striking; they evidently fulfilled an important function in generating and transmitting his scholarly persona in Japan. This is perhaps most apparent at the Ranke festival. The display of the portrait fulfilled the ritual purposes of honoring a scholarly ancestor and making present a learned lineage. But most of the participants were students, and for them the portrait also instantiated and focalized the disciplinary virtues and vices that were enumerated by the speakers and thus invited their internalization as part of socialization into the discipline. Falko Schnicke rightly reminds us that this function of academic portraits carried much significance in the late nineteenth century, when options to travel in person and meet other scholars were comparatively limited. In these circumstances, portraits served a “collectivizing” purpose that helped forge and sustain an imagined community and disciplinary identity.Footnote ⁸⁴

There is direct evidence that the portrait could focalize scholarly virtues in this sense: Kuwabara Jitsuzō (1871–1931), who had studied at the Imperial University in Tokyo and heard lectures by Riess before being appointed professor in oriental history in Kyoto in 1909, had decorated a wall of his study with a Ranke portrait. His son later remembered in a conversation on his father's scholarship, “The quality was not good; maybe it was a lithograph. But I heard from childhood that Ranke was a great scholar. That left a deep impression on me.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Naturally, the inferior quality of the picture did not make a big difference if it was not Ranke the individual but Ranke the persona that mattered to Kuwabara. Among Ranke's virtues, the one that seems to have carried the most weight for him was his rigorous source criticism, as he often complained that Chinese scholarship was “unscientific” because most books lacked a scholarly apparatus.Footnote ⁸⁶ Like the biblical writing on the wall, Ranke, solemnly observing the historical work that was being carried out by Kuwabara, thus served as a constant warning to uphold the standards of the discipline.

The Ranke persona in interaction

This brings us to the question of the wider impact of the Rankean persona on Japanese historians. After all, apart from China historian Kuwabara, we have so far mostly zoomed in on the group of Japanese historians of Europe and America for the simple reason that some of them had traveled to Germany, knew some German, and were thus the first group to encounter his name, persona and work. Among the next generation of students, there were two for whom the Rankean moment sparked a deeper interest in further engagement with Ranke: Murakawa Kengo and Abe Hidesuke. They were to become the first translators of Ranke's works, and Abe later also published a history of German historiography.Footnote ⁸⁷ Tsuboi and Mitsukuri, the two professors of Western history, also took seriously the Japanese Rankean standards of contemporary relevance and geographical breadth of their research topics. Mitsukuri's main research focus, for example, was the French Revolution and Napoleon, but he also published on the Great War and lectured about it at the universities of the Japanese armed forces.Footnote ⁸⁸

Yet scholarly virtues and personae are always contested and scholars rarely “appropriate a single persona, but [navigate] between multiple models of scholarly selfhood.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In light of this and the short duration of the Rankean moment, rather than speaking of the impact of the Rankean persona per se, it makes sense to consider it in interaction. The pamphlet of the Ranke festival made clear that Japanese historians simultaneously drew on other models of virtuous disciplinary behavior: its organizers announced that they also planned a festival for the eminent Edo-period Japanese historian Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725) and, “if time permits, for outstanding Greek and Roman historians as well.”Footnote ⁹⁰ In contrast to what Herman Paul observed for Germany, however, academic historians do not appear to have positioned themselves between “pairs of proper names turned into models of virtue.”Footnote ⁹¹ Even while discussing Ranke's weak points, there was no single other proper name that would have suggested itself as an obvious counterpart.

Things look a bit different if we also consider historians who did not work in the rarefied environment of academic history departments. In 1909, Yamaji Aizan (1865–1917), one of the writers who had been active in the Min'yūsha group, published an article on “History and Historians in Present-Day Japan” in which he distinguished between two types of history writing. As before, Macaulay is the epitome of engaging and relevant historiography and stands for history as an art. The second type is characterized by the pursuit of “historical facts for the sake of historical facts without asking whether the result of this research will move people's hearts” and a “single-minded effort concerning how to arrive at the real historical truth.” Yamaji concludes, “This is the new type of historical science, and it is said that Ranke is one of its advocates.”Footnote ⁹² In a slightly amusing turn, despite Max Lenz's praise for Ranke's Goethe-like gift for storytelling, it seems that the mere fact that Ranke had been championed by academism was enough for Yamaji to put him down as the embodiment of dullness.Footnote ⁹³

To consider another example of the interaction of virtues from various sources and how they could reinforce each other, let us take one last look at the back of the cover page of the festival pamphlet. It was adorned with a poem excavated from Leopold von Ranke's diaries. It read,

It should strike us as peculiar that the pamphlet was led in by a poem that spells out Ranke's religious convictions when the speeches that followed were quite frank about their disdain for Ranke's religiosity. It was certainly not selected for its aesthetic appeal, which was limited and possibly not even fully accessible to the intended audience. Nor is it probable that this was a favorite poem of Ludwig Riess's and chosen by him, both because he was Jewish and because he had returned to Germany after the end of his tenure the year before the festival.Footnote ⁹⁵

What remains, then, is the sheer fact of the poem being a poem. The ability to write—especially Sinitic—poetry had been an essential scholarly virtue in Japan for centuries. In composing Sinitic poetry, scholars could demonstrate their mastery of classical Chinese, the foundation of all learning until the last decades of the nineteenth century. Poetry created and exchanged on the spot in scholarly gatherings served as a social lubricant. It was also a means to express personal feelings and political opinions.Footnote ⁹⁶ The exalted place of poetry carried over into the Meiji period. Many intellectuals, among them Shigeno Yasutsugu, founded new poetic societies and exchanged verses with Chinese scholar-literati at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo.Footnote ⁹⁷ It is no surprise, then, that the biographical sketches of Macaulay and Treitschke mentioned earlier both dwelled extensively on their poetic and stylistic talents and achievements. The article on Macaulay even featured a Japanese translation of one of his poems.Footnote ⁹⁸

Finally, let us fast-forward to 1938, when Inoue Tetsujirō (1856–1944), professor of philosophy at the Imperial University in Tokyo, penned a recollection piece about Shigeno, his former colleague and one of the most eminent Japanese historians of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁹ Inoue remembered how Shigeno was already renowned for “seven strong points” during his years as a student at the Shōhei Academy. Apart from his scholarship, these were: “second, poetry, that is, Sinitic poetry; third, prose, that is, Sinitic prose; fourth, penmanship, the professor was good at calligraphy; fifth, the game of go, he was quite strong at that; sixth: the drum; and seventh, his appearance. His appearance was dignified and truly imposing. These were called Seisai's [Shigeno's] seven perfections.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ To these seven, among which, it should be duly noted, Sinitic poetry had the pride of place right after “scholarship,” Inoue added three more: his “insight,” by which he meant the breadth of his scholarship that went beyond Chinese and Confucian classical texts and led him to the study and renewal of Japanese history; his public speaking skills, which were not as common at that point in Japan; and his good health.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Yet Inoue also had one point of regret about Shigeno: “If the professor had learned Western scholarship, he would have been able to make even more excellent arguments. But since … he did not understand a word of English, French or German etc., that surely must have been frustrating and unsatisfactory.” Inoue uttered this as a philosopher commenting on Shigeno's limited knowledge of European discussions of ethics, but his argument was precisely that this knowledge would have deepened Shigeno's understanding of the historical development of human morality. This shows how virtues derived from different times, places and disciplines were in play simultaneously to evaluate one scholar's historical practice. Both Inoue's definition of “insight” as related to the breadth of research interests and his critique of Shigeno's alleged lack of familiarity with Western scholarship point in the same direction: more than thirty years after the Rankean moment, the achievements of one of the most eminent Japanese historians were still measured against a standard of geographical breadth of outlook that echoed the virtues for which Ranke had been most celebrated around 1900.

A Japanese Ranke for a global discipline

In absence of previous substantial research into the Japanese encounter with Ranke, it is quite clear that the frequent, almost obstinate, reference to the German historian in earlier European and American accounts was more than anything a Eurocentric discursive device that served to assert and establish both the connection of Japanese historical scholarship to its “modern” origin in the West and its derivative character. The concept of the scholarly persona has proven helpful in cutting through this undue focus on Western origins by shifting the conversation to Japanese concerns about epistemic virtues. In breaking down Ranke into a constellation of traits, the concept of the persona allowed us to sidestep simplistic “developmental models” and see how these traits matched concerns with scholarly conduct and priorities that had occupied Japanese historians long before they discovered Ranke.Footnote ¹⁰² It was precisely this mix-and-match approach as an act of cultural translation that enabled the adoption of a Rankean persona in Japan. In their survey of the global history of historiography, Georg Iggers and Edward Wang thus rightly stress the agency of Japanese scholars: “the Japanese tradition of historical study was thus reformed and transformed via a cross-cultural exchange … In Riess's presentation of and his Japanese audience's perception of Ranke, this German master's image experienced a metamorphosis.”Footnote ¹⁰³

As we have seen, Japanese historians had a rather circumscribed agenda. Considering the concrete timing of their rendezvous with Ranke from 1899 to 1903 and the aspects of his persona they highlighted the most, the reason for the Rankean moment comes into relief. He received attention at the specific juncture when historical scholarship was coalescing into a global academic profession.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This is how most Japanese historians experienced it, starting with Shigeno Yasutsugu, who had declared his conviction that “scholarship around the world has at last switched onto the same track” already in 1890.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ A globalizing discipline needed a minimal global standard, and Ranke's image proved malleable enough to serve as a blueprint persona even in Japan. What made him attractive and relevant as a model researcher there was not his method of source criticism or his impartiality, but his global outlook. Its aspiration for global validity was one of the reasons Japanese intellectuals had sought out Western science to begin with, and Ranke gave it a face.