ludwigfeurbased:

i also remember hearing one theory that the reason German philosophy seemed to have become more popular in post-Meiji than British or French philosophy is something to do with it actually being somewhat easy or at least not very awkward to translate but idk if Im able to get the grant for researching the Kyoto School and Heidegger I’ll look into that

After the Perry Expedition and the unequal treaties opened Japan and the Meiji Restoration shook up the country’s politics, the guys who found themselves in charge realized they weren’t going to be able to maintain a distance from the world anymore. So they looked around and asked “okay, what’s the most advanced country out there?” And in government, medicine, science, philosophy, natural resource management, it was Prussia. (Also Prussia didn’t have an apparatus of overseas empire that Japan was afraid of being captured by.)

So they sent a bunch of diplomats and students over there to figure out what they can and bring it back, and invited a bunch of advisors to come to the Home Islands, and engaged in a program of reconstructing Japanese culture largely along Prussian lines.

German became the most commonly known European language in Japan, and was used as the base language for sciences, medicine, and engineering, much like Latin was used in Europe. In addition to granting access to western knowledge, German fluency was useful because Japan was only starting to standardize its language and kanji nationwide, and a readymade common language was helpful for scholars and technicians to share ideas.

In terms of human culture, the education system and the bureaucracy were built up along heavily centralized Wilhelmine lines (which is why, if you follow anime, all Japanese schools are still mostly identical, from curricula down to floor plans), though sometimes with an eye towards avoiding problems revealed in the German experience - for example they’d noticed that bureaucrats had become a problematically strong interest group, so in Japan any government employee - from soldiers down to teachers and mailmen - was denied the vote. This led to strikes later on and played into the takeover of the government by the military, but that’s another story.

So in summary, German philosophy was more popular in the Meiji era because German everything was more popular in the Meiji era. There’re still traces of it now - Utena, for example, is all about student duelling, Hesse-style spiritualism, and the seminar system of education as a subversive force. It’s not well known in the US, but until the American occupation, Japan and Germany were the same kind of Super Bros that Japan and America are now. The fact that Japan twice in succession remade their society as a mirror of another country’s has a lot to do with the Japanese inferiority complex about being a nation of perfect copiers but not innovators.