It is usually believed that the introduction and wide circulation of Montesquieu’s De l'esprit des lois in the Meiji period had instilled in the Japanese discourses the specific Orientalist view of Asia’s despotic system of government, which views the centralization of power in Asian countries as the political consequence of this region’s climate and precipitation conditions. In fact, as Japan was increasingly involved into encounter with her Asian neighbors after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), discussions on “Oriental despotism” had culminated three times, each time in an entirely different political and intellectual context. As a result, the concept “Oriental despotism” in Japanese has been associated to an evidently more nuanced connotation spectrum and gained multi-faceted layers of meanings than its counterparts in European languages. To trace the gradual transformation of the meaning of this concept helps understand both ups and downs of Japan’s continental policy and paradigm shifts in Japan’s modern social sciences.

Relying on the methodological approach of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), this paper seeks to explore the historical semantic changes of the concept “Oriental despotism” in modern Japanese. It analyzes the three intense debates over this concept, by examining the representative advocates’ understandings of the concept “Oriental despotism” against the background of the intertwining of political circumstances and intellectual reflection. By doing so, this paper sheds light on the ways in Japan’s modern social sciences had shaped its engagement with Asia and and vice versa.