The Birth of the Autobiography Genre in Japan

Abstract

Traditional Japan did not know a full-fledged genre of autobiography. The goal of life was to receive recognition of one’s merits, which would be reflected in an official posthumous biography. Sporadic attempts to describe one’s own life are observed, for the most part, in those cases when the authorities treated the author, in his opinion, unfairly, and he tried to justify himself before descen­dants. In other words, these were confessions of losers. These works prove that educated people of that time had sufficient intellectual potential to describe their own lives. However, their general attitudes, as a rule, rejected such an opportu­nity. Excessive manifestations of the “personal” were considered a sign of “im­modesty” and loss of orientation in social and existential space. This is not about the “underdevelopment” of the personality, but about conscious self-restraint in favor of the “common” cause. The situation changed along with Japan’s intro­duction to Western culture and civilization in the second half of the 19th century. This shook the traditional views on the relationship between the collective and the personal, attracted interest in the individual as a positive beginning, raised its status, affected the self-esteem of this or that person. The first full-fledged auto­biography of the Western type belongs to the famous educator Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), which he published in 1898. It was called Fukuo Jiden (Autobio­graphy of the Elder Fukuzawa). It was a story about how the author achieved success in life, and according to this parameter, Fukuo Jiden is characteristic of the Anglo-American tradition of “success story”. After the publication of this work, the genre of autobiography began to become increasingly widespread in Japan.