The emergence of queer nature: Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941) and the making of microbial paradigm 1887-1900

The Japanese independent naturalist-polymath Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941) fascinated scholars of modern Japan with his prolific work that traversed disciplinary boundaries. Yet, the state-centred history writing could not make sense of what underlined his seemingly discursive works and actions, naturally. The thesis elucidates a cohesive account of his transdisciplinary knowledge formation for the first time. It does so by decolonising modern Japanese intellectual history through a novel method. Modern Japanese history typically opened with Japan’s Meiji period (1868-1912) known as the era of the nation’s paradigm shift to the one of the modern West. The thesis reopens the paradigm with one that was ‘microbial’ by conceptualising its underlining logic as ‘queer nature.’ The microbe slime mould that captured his imagination transcended male-female, plant-animal, and life-death binaries. Just like this microbe, the process of knowledge production based on queer nature transgressed the binary and hierarchical conceptions of the West-the-rest male-female, subject-object, intellect-emotion, and life-death. Within the microbial paradigm, Sino-Asian-derived knowledge informed the reasoning behind its knowledge formation. The thesis reveals the followings by asserting queer nature as the basis of truths that emerged in Kumagusu’s life and work during his early adulthood in 1887-1900. These are: his civilisational theory where being ‘civilised’ meant equality and cooperation among all nations, race and sex; metaphysics of what he called “wisdom-knowledge” that facilitated people to ‘civilise’ as above through changes and turns, as opposed to the teleological progress, in his evolutionary henkaron (The Theory of Change); and a form of social sciences that produced their ‘facts’ and ideas as historically authentic in a centreless and non-hierarchical manner, in what I call ‘queer historicity.’ Reopening the intellectual history of modern Japan with queer nature thus illuminates the microbial paradigm whose significant intellectual phenomena remained marginalised, until now