THE TRANSLATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC INTELLECT: SCOTTISH LITERARY EDUCATION IN TOKYO

I Method This survey of attitudes towards Scottish culture is based on fifteen-question questionnaires distributed to undergraduate students in Tokyo before and after Scottish literature courses I conducted during the period 2000-2004. The questionnaires were distributed to students at three different universities, one singlesex private, one mixed private, and one mixed national, all in Tokyo. The courses fell under various names, which had a bearing on students’ expectations and thus how well they were able to relate the national specificities of Scottish literary culture to other questions within the humanities. Approximately two-thirds of the recipients responded in all, and the larger absolute number of respondents from the first institution is mostly due to the fact that I taught the course for three years (extended from one) and that the number of students was surprisingly high, at times exceeding 100. No student filled in the questionnaire twice, even if they attended the course more than once, and all students answered independently, that is, without conferring with one another. An attendance record of two-thirds was expected, though not strictly enforced, giving rise to the possibility of students missing something apparently obvious; one irony is that Japanese students spend much of their fourth year sorting out their jobs to come (and there were a few finalists in these classes).

best).These lectures were given in English, while at the other two universities classes were given in Japanese.At this first institution, I was given a free hand to design the course and the lectures went under the rubric of 'special', that it, outside of the remit of any one faculty.The second institution was in a slot of ibunka, the bunka meaning culture and the i meaning different, immediately flagging up the two questions of whether one can 'count' cultures as belonging to nations -a nation being only one axis of analysis for a cultural theorist.This course I only conducted for one year, as with the last course, before giving up part-time teaching (of which most Japanese academics do one or perhaps two, in addition to their normal full-time teaching load).The third course was conducted at the country's most prestigious university (see above -there is no real room for debate in a statement like this), and again I was given a free hand, though in practice many students expected a chiiki bunka approach, that is, an explanation of the everyday specificities of Scottish culture rather than a critical Cultural Studies approach directed onto one nation.
What are presented here are the answers to a set of fifteen questions about Scottish culture and literature, before and after my course.The need for double participation in part accounts for the incomplete number of respondents, the students having to be available, free, and willing both at the start of the course and the end; moreover there was no extra credit for filling in the questionnaire -this being my own project -and names were not given.Only students filling in a 'before' and 'after' questionnaire could be used.The before-and-after sequence is not intended to show the efficiency of the courses -though there was a high degree of success at the private women's college, and progress despite stubborn spots at the other two institutions -but rather an intriguing change in attitude.The questions were given in English, mostly to circumvent the fact that a new term such as ingurando (England) fires off warning signals which cause the point of the question of separating England and the UK (questions one and two) to stand out in artificial relief.Answers were invited in Japanese or English; in practice only five of 101 were returned in English.
Shown below are four tables, the first giving the absolute numbers of respondents before the course, the second the same calculated as percentages; the third shows the absolute numbers of respondents after the course, and the fourth the same in percentages.A good answer, the first column, is taken to be a well-presented opinion armed with the facts (about as many facts as in a Scottish institutio); a confused answer, the second column, is one which has grasped something of the argument, but can't present it in a lucid or convincing way, and has not absorbed as much about Scottish literature as would lead to a decent grade in Scotland; a wrong answer or no answer is either a blank or an answer which shows an inability to argue coherently, in possession of very few of the parameters of the debate.None of these categories fixed students to the cultural politics of any specific question: that is, if a student argued the prima facie absurd case that the UK is a nation and Scotland a state, but they did so cogently and in the context of a well-argued answer demonstrating a high knowledge of the subject, this would be classified as a good answer.

II Purpose
The questions were broadly split into four categories, concerning Scottish society and nationhood (questions 1-6), education (questions 7-8), language (questions 9-10), and literature (questions 11-15).For most students Scotland falls under the fairly common 'British Culture', or in literary studies even more commonly 'English Literature', which term has a now-familiar treblethink: 'literature in English', 'literature from England' (territoriality is implied in the category eibeibungaku, 'literature from England/ Britain and the U.S.'), and finally literature which is moving towards an accepted canonicity, a typology which was pushed by the Scottish literati in the eighteenth century but had pretty much disappeared in Scottish universities by the end of the twentieth.
One typical assumed motivation for my teaching the course at the outset was that I was introducing 'my' culture, through a sense of ethnic pride or duty.One task was to persuade students that I was not simply advocating Scotland as a great nation but suggesting that it has, and will have increasingly, a central role in reconfiguring their Anglocentric ideas of Eng Lit and drawing out the specificities of each of the UK's four nations, otherwise confused.The first two questions are intended to draw this outthe term igirisu (taken from fifteenth-century Portuguese travellers and thus originally correct in denoting England) colloquially means both England and the U.K., and this clogging of terms is even tougher to dislodge than it is in England itself.This was perhaps most successful at Tsuda, which has had both very radical and very conservative streaks within Eng Lit, and which has also has close links with the University of Edinburgh, as well as sending students on, mine amongst them, to the MA in Scottish Literature at Glasgow.
The thrust of the lectures was not only the usual roll-call of inventions, but also a questioning of the methods of Eng Lit itself, and the philosophical concepts of corporate justice and modernisation which got twisted between eighteenth-century Scotland and late-twentieth century US culture and has swamped many young Japanese people.These basics allowed me to move on to literary history, stressing West Coast tradition as well as Edinburghmost Scottish travel guidebooks describing a triangle whose points are London, the Historic City Of Edinburgh, and somewhere around Skye.As well as the obvious remit of getting students more interested in a rich national literature, I was trying to show them how the area has created or transmitted many of the values they now take for granted, and how Scottish literary culture is dealing with this legacy now (one example is suggesting that Irving Welsh's Trainspotting, the film of which brought one or two to my course, is less about a group of young British hipsters doing their own thing, than about the traps Scotland has set for itself in terms of sectarianism, imperialism, gender, and welfare; Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares was translated as 'Brit Pop' by an academic at Tsuda.That Scotland should flag up the question of the relationship of culture to nationhood per se so strongly is indicated by students' increased ability to answer the one absolute trick question about England ruling India; it would be interesting to see what percentage of students at Scottish universities would come up with the most obvious 'correct answer' that since during Britain's phase of interest in India, England didn't have a state, it couldn't 'rule' any other country.

III Results 1a
Table of absolute

IV Conclusions
General interest in Scottish culture and literature was surprisingly high, especially amongst students at the private single-sex university, and was readily awakened in all three institutions when it was shown how Scottish literature was able to shake off its historical host/predator to problematise the more familiar project of Eng Lit, the canon of which students already had a mental map.Although students harboured doubts about what makes up nationhood -doubts which I assured them went up to the highest level of scholarship -as in seen by the confusion even at the end between nation and state -30%, 68%, 11% -they mostly grasped and were interested by the UK's unique status and thus why Scottish Studies, or even, amongst the more inquisitive, a possible reworked English Studies, was emerging within what they had known as British Studies.
The idea that Scotland 'became a nation again' in 1997, force-fed to Scots by a New Labour government which, pace Tom Nairn, would have allowed them to believe anything in order to hold the union together, proved a sticking point.Nevertheless, by the end most understood the functions of the parliament and the differences between devolved and reserved matters, and thus could intelligently explain the power shifts of 1997-99 -64% at Tsuda and 67% at Tokyo.(Here a debt is also owed to the website of the Scottish Parliament, light-years ahead of that of the British Parliament, for improving the quality of the answers).Almost all at Tsuda and Tokyo avoided the worse but more obvious trap of thinking that Scotland had become independent in 1997, yet some were skeptical when I suggested that this could happen soon, reverting to my imagined ethnic pride.The flagging up of differences between the faculties of nation and a state also had the important by-product of making students think about the apparent stability of their own nation-state, one in which modernisation has been conducted unevenly, especially after 1868 and 1945, and where national specificity has become bound up with statehood.
There were at all three institutions a number of students who struggled to find Scotland's status as stateless nation even slightly relevant -25%, 50%, and 11% were aware of differences but could not properly distinguish between them, and, somewhat surprisingly, 36% at the most enthusiastic institution, Tsuda, had problems with national nomenclature even at the end of the course.To an extent the lack of engagement in some areas is down to the juken system in which tests to enter a particular institution are more important than what takes place in that institution, and at times incentive is only really greatly present in those who intend to go on to further study.This accounts for the unwillingness at Meiji to rethink the Anglocentric (Anglo-only) term igirisu (32%) or shake off the colloquial beliefs about language that overpower them in everyday culture.At all levels, the term igirisu is to an extent impenetrable; even at the ends of courses in normal speech the best students were struggling to find a name for the country south of Scotland which was not also the name for the UK as a whole.The term ingurando was encouraged and some students become confident using it, as can be seen in their picking up of the trick question of England and India; this is something of an advance since in public discourse there is no distinction between igirisu-as-UK and igirisu-as-England.
Despite the relatively high knowledge of things British, some questions which Scottish literature scholars find basic had not been touched on in the students' education at all so far (probably true throughout the world outside Scotland itself), such as the relation between nation and state, language and state, or, more forgivably, the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment.This last was one of the early foci of my course, and most students at Tsuda and Tokyo were fairly aware of its ambivalent legacy by the end -64%, 67% were the figures.The three-way paradigm of Highlands-West-East as stressed in the 1950s by David Daiches had to be put in historical, as well as geographical, context, to prepare for the ambivalences in literary views of place found in writers the students already knew for their creation of modernism, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.
The Highlands and Islands were well-represented in the students' touristic, if not literary, imaginations (which I attempted to cure with a dose of Iain Crichton-Smith's Consider the Lilies).At the start Edinburgh was seen with wearisome regularity as the largest city -39%, 73%, 44%; to some extent though this also was a trick question, since Edinburgh looms so large in travelminded imaginations.The imaginary status of Edinburgh as biggest was easily fixed -95%, 77%, 100% -but it was important also to fill in a lot of the history of Glasgow, its nineteenth century swelling, the reasons for this rapid population increase, the labour movements which grew from it, its shipbuilding and engineering heritage, and its continued everyday political radicalism.Fiction by Alan Spence and James Kelman was contextualized within this framework, and parts of Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe and Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher (with a Forthsythian nod) were shown, the former film to enormous popularity.
Perhaps the most successful area of the courses, and in a sense the area in which understanding of the rest depended, was education, especially at Tsuda.This is in part (as corroborated by the students) because they were in education themselves, and in part that many will go on to become middle-or high-school teachers.Most revealingly, the students were quick to grasp the two main tenets of Scottish democratic intellectualisminclusiveness and interdisciplinarity.The percentages able to talk intelligently about these questions at the end of the courses were an extraordinary 79% and 89% at Tsuda and Tokyo.Indeed, 67% at each were able to historicise the phenomenon of the lad o'pairts, usually offering a critical opinion and sometimes thinking up more recent analogues such as, tellingly, Sean Connery (see Alan Riach's 2005 book Representing Scotland for a brilliant explication of Fleming's Connery's ambivalent control of his own Scottishness).Even more importantly, many students were ready to accept what some Scottish Studies scholars of a certain vintage and leaning still find difficult to swallow, that it is less important to test the 'truth' of these two tenets of democratic intellectualism than accept that they have become part of an enabling myth which has pervaded Scottish intellectual culture and de facto determines how we see education, its political driving force, and the way it is conducted.
As might have been predicted, when asked which languages were used in Scotland, most initially answered English and um, Scottish, by which they often meant Gaelic when they had heard of Gaelic, though at the start the distinction between Gaelic and Scots was blurred, and Ireland sometimes entered the picture in zany positions.The knowledge of Scots was sparse, and it was typically seen as a low-prestige dialect of British English -less a pejorative comment on the Scottish people than following the Japanese model in which hyojungo (Standard Japanese) is seen as 'correct' in a prescriptive grammar sense.As might be expected of a nation which typically associates itself with a single language and a single people, initially students almost entirely failed to twig to the fact that there would be large numbers of Scots speaking, for example, Arabic or Urdu (this is the biggest factor behind the initial figures of 5%, 11%, 0% for a 'good answer', jumping to 79%, 36%, 67% by the end).The linguistics section of the course was thus built on unpromising ground but attracted a great deal of interest; at Tsuda and Tokyo by the end of the course the students could usually articulate a full answer to this fundamental question, and 67%, 50%, and 67% effectively tackle the question of Scots as a language; by the end, despite the lure of prescriptive grammar, they had mercifully stopped seeing the diction of James Kelman as qualitatively subordinate to that of E.M. Forster.
With the exception of Tsuda -the women's college, whose students made serious research efforts -the place of women writers in Scottish literature remained problematic.This is perhaps not surprising, since it is problematic in Scotland itselflook at the endlessly-reproduced ersatz canon of the painting Poet's Pub, or dip a toe into the void of canonised creative work and contemporary critical material; a problem addressed to some extent by Douglas Gifford et al in their multi-volume collection Scottish Language and Literature (2002, which some Tsuda students had access to) and the tireless efforts of cultural historians like Margery Palmer MacCulloch.An obvious choice, but Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie proved popular; at Tsuda especially a lot of its highly subtle wit was grasped, and it also made for a much-needed corrective to the travel book version of The Historical City Of Edinburgh.However since Scottish literature/Scottish cultural studies is in disciplinary terms smothered by Eng Lit/British cultural studies, it was hard to tell whether a set of Scottish women writers had been sought out from scratch, or there had been a 'bleeding' effect from Eng Lit, amidst a wellknown canon of counter-examples, along the Eliot-Woolf-Plath track.While the Tsuda students performed well on this (82%), the figure is a bit misleading since many of the answers were similar and access to canonised women writers is a major problem for Scottish literature itself, one solution being to widen the canon to include diaries, letters, and so on, as some scholars are doing.
One reason that a lot of Glasgow literature had been almost entirely overlooked within Eng Lit thus far was that in Japan literature is often held to be a gentleman's pursuit -thus the initially strange-looking question about the igirisu shinshi -the British (here a synonym of English) gentleman.There was little conception of the working-class novel -class itself, indeed, is a difficult concept to teach, given the interest in the US, with its largely post-Industrial Revolution class system; students tend to overassociate class with money or even fashion sense, as well as, in a more old-fashioned tone, family name, and to use terms like 'high class' and 'low class', rarely having been exposed to more familiar European Marxist paradigms.Correspondingly, I started with little sense of the cultural politics of dialect, so important to struggles between the 1970s and '90s to establish a Scottish urban, particularly Glasgow, literature.Most Japanese literary novelists are graduates of elite universities (again, this epithet is not intended to impose a value-judgment, but is in common use, is, in Frantz Fanon's terms, a 'social fact'), overwhelmingly Tokyo plus about another three, and are colloquially thought to occupy a world too hard/highbrow for most people to penetrate.Thus, I used the straw man of the igirisu shinshi, literally meaning British gentleman, but almost always understood as English gentleman, still a serious imaginary presence, to show that most start unable to adequately relate national literature to class -67%, 95%, 83%.This is one axis, of course, that the move from chiiki bunka (studies of the 'everyday life' of specific regions) to bunkaron (cultural studies focusing on a definite problematic, here the Scottish nation and its literature) was supposed to fix, as the confusion level had dropped to 41%, 56%, 47%.Social class for some remained something of a puzzle, though many showed good skills, with a little prompting, in terms of relating episodes of fiction (such as in Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing and James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late) to specific social changes, for example privatisation in education, housing, and healthcare.

V Summary
The idea of the Scottish democratic intellect and satellite concepts, in particular a certain way of doing literature, proved surprisingly welcome and well-grasped in the classroom, doubtless in part because the students were 'doing education' every day and were having to make choices about where that education was taking them.They also understood, though, that the key educational theme in Scottish Studies was no longer to establish the truth about whether the lad o'pairts had ever existed in number, or whether it really was possible to switch from cosmology to Greek in 1790s Edinburgh, but how the democratic intellect ideal had become a cornerstone of how Scotland imagines its own education, and, correspondingly, its own political representation, community, language, and literature.It was largely due to the enthusiastic responses to questions surrounding education and language that unfamiliar literatures could be introduced; in most cases, armed with a new terminology and a tendency to think twice about Eng.Lit., students were able to go on to ask more complex questions, some even going on to study Scottish Literature at postgraduate level in Scotland itself.
numbers of student answers before the course; the total number of respondents are given in brackets next to the institution's name and the numbers are split into the three categories: Good Answer or Well-Educated Guess/ Confused Answer/ Completely Wrong Answer or Blank.1b The above (results before the course) expressed as percentages 2a Absolute numbers of respondents at the end of the course 2b The above (end of the course) expressed as percentages