(no subject)
I really am overcome with affection for the long-dead Fukuzawa. He was so well-meaning in his struggle against stiff old notions. This is Part Two of "On Japanese Women", and he's lambasting the very fundaments of Confucian cosmology:
"...This yin-yang theory is the fantasy of the Confucianists and has no proof or logic. Its origins go back several thousand years to dark and illiterate ages when men looked around and whenever they thought they recognized pairs of something, one of which seemed to be stronger or more remarkable than the other, they called one yang and the other yin... This is the level of the logic behind this theory and we today should regard it as no more than childish nonsense. ... Between men and women, there never existed any such distinctions ... But some scholars of the Confucian trend must have felt like belittling women, and for no other reason than their own prejudice, classed women as yin. It was a great nuisance on the part of women to have been thus involved in an empty theory which extended to the sun and the moon and heavens and earth, and which had nothing to do with women's relations to men..."
I'm not, like, au fait with the accepted wisdom about the origins of yin-yang - and Fukuzawa's not all that dependable when it comes to sweeping generalised remarks. (At one point he insists bizarrely that "Islam ... places its basis on sexual lust but still proves prosperous even today".) But I like 阴阳 as a notional, you know, dichotomy because it's the binary system that powers the Book of Changes. Earlier today I was dawdling over Fukuzawa and did a silly calculation based on the library catalogue number of one of the books on my desk. The result was hexagram 55: 丰, Abundance, whose judgement says "Be like the sun at midday", with a moving fourth line, leading to 36: 明夷, Darkening of the Light, which is the symbol for "sun" hiding under the symbol for "earth". The name of the book is The Hidden Sun: Women of Modern Japan. I'm not even going to go into the whole sun-imagery thing and the imperial bloodline of Amaterasu the Sun Goddess and Hiratsuka Raichô's 1911 "In the beginning, woman was the sun / Now she is the moon..." and all that, because I can see you DROOPING.
K xx