2018 Volume 69 Issue 2 Pages 179-195
Yujiro Motora (1858-1912) was the first professor of psychology at Tokyo Imperial University, and is known as the pioneer of Modern Psychology in Japan. However, his Ph.D. dissertation, titled “Exchange, considered as the principle of social life,” submitted to Johns Hopkins University in 1888, focused on social science and sociology. Moreover, he wrote numerous papers on sociology, social psychology, and social surveys after his return from the United States, and in the end, joined the important Japanese association for sociology in the Meiji period, “Society for the Study of Sociology (syakaigaku kenkyukai),” as one of its founders in 1898.
In this article, I will focus on an as-yet-unknown aspect of the sociological work of Motora, and try to reconstruct his concept of the “science of society” from the fragments of his voluminous writings. I will examine Motora's role in early Japanese sociology, in outline, and give an introduction to the idea of psychological sociology and empirical research methods based on statistics. In his incomplete conception, both experimental psychology and sociology, or the theory of sense and the theory of society, are situated within a comprehensive “science of society.” His stance functioned as a critical comment on mainstream sociology of those days, such as Tongo Takebe's curious contamination of his nationalistic sociology and Herbert Spencer's concept of society as an organism. Further, he endeavored to conduct the earliest stages of social surveys in Japan, and was influential on younger sociologists.
My research shows that, while Yujiro Motora was called a “pioneer of Japanese psychology” in previous research, his achievement should be evaluated as “one of the sources of Japanese sociology.”.
