The History of Japanese Psychology: Global Perspectives, 1875–1950

by Brian J. McVeigh, Bloomsbury Press, 2017.  ISBN-13: 978-1474283083 // ISBN-10: 147428308X

During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries the individual became the basic, self-contained unit of society whose interior life was increasingly privileged.  This “inward turn” resonated with new forms of governance and constitutionalism that demanded self-determining citizens.  Meanwhile, burgeoning capitalism required workers to become isolatable but interchangeable parts for mechanized economic production.  Around this time the nascent social sciences began theorizing about the autonomous though alienated subject.  Such developments were part of a broader psychological revolution that valued “inner experience.”  How did this interiorization of the person play out in Japan?

This book explores the origins of Japanese Psychology.  By highlighting the contributions of pioneers such as Motora Yūjirō (1858–1912) and Matsumoto Matatarō (1865–1943), it charts cross-cultural connections, commonalities, and the transition from religious–moralistic to secular–scientific definitions of human nature.  Emerging at the intersection of philosophy, pedagogy, physiology, and physics, Psychology confronted the pressures of industrialization and became allied with attempts to integrate individual subjectivities into larger and larger institutions and organizations.  Such social management was accomplished through Japan’s establishment of a schooling system that incorporated Psychological research, making educational practices both products of and the driving force behind changing notions of selfhood.  In response to new forms of labor and loyalty, applied Psychology led to and became implicated in intelligence tests, personnel selection, therapy, counseling, military science, colonial policies, and “national spirit.”  The birth of Japanese Psychology, however, was more than a mere adaptation to the challenges of modernity: it heralded a transformation of the very mental processes it claimed to be exploring.

Prologue: Spiritual Physics—A Physics for the Soul
1: Places, Periods and Peoples: Problematizing Psyche
2: Historical Context: Japanese Cosmology and Psychology as Secularized Theology
3: From Soul to Psyche: A Change of Mind in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan
4: Early Institutionalization: How Higher Education Disciplined the Psyche
5: Motora Yūjirō and Matsumoto Matatarō: The Founders of Japanese Psychology
6: Intellectual Reactions: Spiritualizing the Psyche and Psychologizing Society
7: Organizational Institutionalization: Professionalization, Applications and Measuring the Mind
8: Disciplinary Maturation: Specializations, Theories and Psychotherapy
9: Nationalist‒Imperialist Psychology: State, Schooling and Military Applications
10: Reconstruction and Expansion: Postimperial Japan as a Psychologized Society
Epilogue: In Retrospect: Trajectories, Alternative Routes and the Contributions of Japanese Women Psychologists