著者

金山 泰志

出版者

公益財団法人史学会

雑誌

史學雜誌 (ISSN:00182478)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.120, no.11, pp.1856-1880, 2011-11-20

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Much of the research to date concerning how China was viewed by Japan during the Meiji period has focused on specific intellectual strata or individual figures, mostly in a negative vein, and has yet to empirically study shifting trends among the general population. Given this situation, the present article focuses on the country's children, using the medium of children's magazines and how they depicted China to identify a major shift during the period just before and after the 1st Sino-Japanese War. Because children's magazines contain not only topical and amusement features, but also educational ones, content seen as edifying for children was included to a significant degree, therefore presenting an evaluation of China thought to be appropriate in Japanese society as a whole. First, the author finds that the content of children's magazines forces one to make a distinction between contemporary China and the China of the classical world, the common trend from the sample of articles chosen being to portray the former in a negative light, the latter in a positive one. Due to the outbreak of war between the two countries, this negative view of contemporary China shifted greatly along with a significant increase of related features on the subject. However, throughout the period in question, this negative trend continued to appear side-by-side with the positive view of historical China. The research to date has not considered this distinction and coexistence, which made it possible, in light of the centuries of historical interaction between Japan and China, for Japanese public opinion to avoid putting the past in a pejorative context for the sake of contemporary feelings of animosity.