earticle

영어

This study, through a discourse analysis from a perspective of argumentation studies, addresses questions encountered in Okakura Tenshin (1863-1913)’s two works, The Ideals of the East, and The Awakening of the East. The questions prompted by considering historical contexts in which those two works were written are: 1) What motivated Okakura to proudly proclaim “Asia is one.” in The Ideals of the East? and 2) Was it the case that in the Awakening of the East Okakura indeed intended to encourage Asian people to fight against Western powers? First in the analysis, it is confirmed that in The Awakening of the East Asia is discursively constructed as an ethnic community, which is supposed to play an inevitable role in the formation of a nation. Next, a view is put forward that a practical reasoning, i.e., a reasoning that leads to a conclusion of the most possible appropriate action to do in a given circumstance, underlies a discourse of The Awakening of the East. Given that a practical reasoning can switch back and forth between an argumentation and an explanation according to context, the final phase of the analysis, by observing a relative weight shifted to the conclusion of the reasoning in the latter half of the work, demonstrates that the discourse of The Awakening of the East functions as an explanation. This leads to the conclusion that what Okakura indeed attempted to claim is that Asia is of irreplaceable value as an ethnic community. This is the way how this study reinforces that an approach from the viewpoint of argumentation studies can exert an effect on discourse analyses.