| The dissertation addresses the early political thought of the German-trained, Japanese zoologist and popularizer of evolutionism, Oka Asajiro (1868--1944). It concentrates on a series of essays that Oka published in major magazines in the years during and after the Russo-Japanese War---writings which were later anthologized as Evolution and Human Life ( Shinka to Jinsei) in 1906 and that appeared again in 1911 and 1921 in expanded versions. I argue that Oka, in these essays, articulated a vision of the human struggle for existence based on the state organism theory of the renowned German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), and did so in a manner that stressed the scientific underpinnings of the emerging family-state ideology of the late 1900s.; Though it treated the emperor as a living god, the family-state concept had, since the 1880s, relied heavily on Haeckel's theory. Having received a doctorate in zoology from the University of Leipzig under Haeckel's colleague Rudolf Leuckart (1823--98), Oka attempted to magnify this aspect of the ideology by using his own internationally recognized researches into manifestations of such state organisms in the natural world---called "corms" by contemporary scientists---to illustrate that national mobilization could be achieved without bowing to superstitions that might undermine technological innovation. For Oka, the nation is a racial super-organism that must overcome internal divisions through the promotion of instinct-building Lamarckian moral habits---what Oka, gesturing to Confucianism, calls the human "way" of altruism---if it is to survive the inevitable war of the corms. This bio-political vision was not meant to undermine the family-state and supplant the emperor, but to convince educated Japanese that the nation literally was a family: an organic entity in the biological sense---one that could thrive as an imperial power only by emulating the "corms" found in nature. |
