On 27th July 2021, Global Asia Research Center, Waseda University, hosted a workshop entitled “Meiji-Taisho Japan and ‘Bourgeois Culture’” presented by Professor Jordan Sand from Georgetown University, Washington DC.

The presentation began with defining the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘bourgeois culture’ in European society, where Professor Sand quoted from one of his favorite books, “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.” After that, he questioned the bourgeois culture in Japanese housing during the Meiji-Taisho period in his book “House and Home in Modern Japan.”

Professor Sand continued presenting the Japanese perspective of the ‘bourgeoisie’ in terms of historiography and the debates on categorizing the ‘bourgeois culture’ or the middle-class value in the Japanese (Meiji-Taisho) society. In his work, he showed the links between Marxism and the social ‘class’ in the field of historiography where the term ‘class’ was considered as a subjective category as he cited from Pierre Bourdieu’s book ― Introduction to a Japanese Reading of Distinction, “Social class does not exist….What exists is a social space, a space of differences, in which classes exist in some sense in a state of virtuality, not as something given but as something to be done.”

Throughout his archival research, he highlighted the ‘bourgeois culture,’ their habits and values that were found in 1) The housing architecture, interior, house design, 2) Family structures in comparison to the other social classes like that of the middle-ranking Samurai or the lower class; 3) Dress and bodily comportment, and 4) Urban landscapes. 

After a fruitful discussion, professor Sand invited two Chinese translators, Liu Shanshan and Zheng Hongbin, who had been translating his book, House and Home in Modern Japan, into the Chinese language to make a speech about what challenges they had faced and overcome during the translation, such as the discrepancy between the word ‘bourgeois’ in Japanese and Chinese.