Why Altaic studies have become popular in Japan
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
Altaic studies may not be familiar to ordinary Japanese people, but on a global scale, there are a considerable number of Japanese researchers, and many of their achievements have been recognized worldwide since the prewar period. Why Altaic studies have become popular in Japan.
Modern Japanese academia began around the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, but historiography was divided into Western, Eastern (Oriental), and national history. They were established as fields that were not intertwined with each other since three civilizations that Japanese had to study: the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Mediterranean = Western European civilization, each had different views of history.
Ludwig Riess, Jewish German, was invited to establish History Department at the Imperial University in 1887. That is, Japan understood universal world history from the perspective of the Germans. However, Japan also interpreted the Western history as it begins with Greek and Roman civilization and ends with Great Britain, France, and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century because following the path of a Mandate of Heaven was the traditional view of history in Japan for over thousand years.
The view of history of the Mediterranean-European civilization that began with Herodotus is completely incompatible with the Chinese view of history, which raises the issue of the legitimacy of the Mandate of Heaven, or incompatible with the view of history Japan have had, describes the legitimacy of the emperor’s rule because of unbroken lineage from the time of myths.
When Japan ended the isolationist policy and opened the country, the coherent narrative Japan once had stopped working. As Japan expanded its sphere of influence from the Korean Peninsula to Manchuria and Mongolia during the Meiji period, Mongolian and Manchu studies came to be incorporated into the Oriental history. Japanese scholars of Oriental history realized that the historical documents used characters other than Chinese characters were important and that there was a large influence from the West, including the Mediterranean. Linguists interested in the origin of Japanese were also attracted to the Altaic language family, which has the same word order as Japanese and has a postposition. This is the reasons why Altaic studies became popular in Japan and has the thickest layer of historical research, and linguists is also at a high international level.