Semiotic Profile: Hyakudai Sakamoto, Pioneer of Semiotic Activities in East Asia
by Takashi Fujimoto

Professor Hyakudai Sakamoto (1928- ) is a leading figure not only in Asian semiotic activities, having eventually organized both Japanese and East Asian Associations for Semiotic Studies (JASS and EAASS hereafter) but also in the field of bioethics, founding both Japanese Association for Bioethics (JAB) and Asian Bioethics Association (ABA). He is a professor emeritus of Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, awarded its honorary prize for his distinguished academic achievements (1981), while his international activities for semiotics culminated during the period of his professorship at Nihon University (1994-99). He is the chief editor of Encyclopedia of Semiotics, published for the first time in Asia in 2002.

Personal Background
None of Sakamoto’s generation, when they were still young, had ever dreamt of the later development of such an transdisciplinary field as semiotics (except in a restricted Lockean or Peircean sense), nor of the prospective field of bioethics, not to mention what the late T. Sebeok proposed as “biosemiotics” in Guadalajara Congress. Academically Sakamoto has been, and still is, a philosopher of science or, better, a scientific philosopher, while he is personally a very esthetic man of taste. He loves music, for instance, to such an extent as to have composed a string quartet or married a professional singer cum teacher of western classical music. He says he was once attracted to French literature such as the works of J. P. Sartre and A. Camus when he was a high school boy. So, when he entered the First Preparatory School (Daiichi-kotogakko) to Imperial Universities in 1948, he took intensive French courses to satisfy his young connoisseurship. But soon he recognized the basis of Sartre’s works was rooted in philosophy, and proceeded to get enrolled in the Philosophy Department of the University of Tokyo.

Soon Sakamoto found himself more interested in theoretically rigid aspects of philosophy, started studying mathematical logic, and gradually expanded his academic interests to the theoretical aspects of physical sciences. At that time in the postwar Japan of late 1950’s a new academic wave of American contemporary philosophy, under a strong influence of logical positivism, came to attack the prewar Japanese philosophical circles, which were thitherto quite idealistic or Marxian or existentialistic. He decided to go to the U. S. to study more about this new movement and eventually studied at Johns Hopkins and UCLA for nearly three years. He was the only Japanese graduate student ever attended the courses of R. Carnap or A. Tarski. Later (1978-79) he went to Chicago and Vienna to do more research works on logical positivism there. With this kind of new training and academic interests he started his progressive works by writing many articles and books to discuss them with his Japanese elders and colleagues at first. He eagerly participated in founding and running a new academic society, Philosophy of Science Society Japan, and later became its president (1991-99).

Sakamoto’s Academic Accomplishments
What Sakamoto has accomplished as a philosopher of science is manifold, but can be classified roughly into four kinds, although all of them share his basic scientific orientations; namely, the orientations towards the mind-body problem, philosophy of language and symbolism, the new theories of cosmological and biological evolution, and a prospective global bioethics. He regarded semiotics as the basis of all these academic enterprises. His first published book was Contemporary Logic (1968), a well-sold textbook which later induced him to step into newly developing fields of semiotics under his general interests in philosophy of language, and which became instrumental for him to get invited to China to open up a new opportunity for East Asian semiotics.

(1) Sakamoto’s idea of Ur-monism:
In late 1970’s, however, his academic concern was shifted from the field of physical sciences to that of biological ones. Strongly influenced by recent developments of both brain physiology and electronic technology, he came to criticize the traditional Cartesian dualism of mind and body to construct instead a new monistic theory under which the Cartesian dualism could be subsumed as a mere “descriptive dualism”. In contrast to D. Davidson’s “anomalous monism” he assumed the existence of what he called “ur-events”, of which two types of linguistic descriptions could somehow become possible, retaining causal connections between mind and body. Readers, if interested, can find the details of this ur-monism in his two books, Philosophy of L’homme-Machine (1980) and Mind and Body: Construction of Ur-Monism (1986), both written in Japanese. After publishing these books and related monographs on this mechanistic approach to human mind his academic concern was gradually shifted toward biological sciences, particularly genetics. Socially, however, he is a long member of not only “Philosophy of Science Society Japan” but Japanese Associations for Philosophy of Science, for Cognitive Science, for Psychology, for Legal Philosophy, for Ethics as well as JASS, playing leading roles as their active board member.

(2) Sakamoto’s View of Life:
Again, Sakamoto was very quick in catching up with the developments of recent biological sciences. Criticizing and reinterpreting Darwinian theory of evolution, he wanted it to be based on new DNA theories so that it might become more effective in its causal and predictive explanations, and that it might successfully explain both “natural” and “artificial” evolutions. He even defines the life as a function of complex DNA systems to survive adaptively to their given environments in the strategic process of living and dying or, in a word, as a surviving machine in evolving process. He farther claims that this idea of life should be accepted as the legitimate view of life within whole circle of scientific philosophy. With this kind of scientific-mindedness he has contributed to founding JAB and later worked as its president in 1997-99. He also cooperated with Qiu Renzhong of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to establish ABA in 1995, and presided over the 4th World Congress of International Association for Bioethics held at Nihon University in 1998.

(3) Sakamoto’s Idea of Ethics and Human Value:
Sakamoto is reluctant to accept that modern western ideology of humanism (anthropocentricism) which is based on such ideas as individual “person”, “human dignity”, or “fundamental human rights” transcending the notion of human kind as a “surviving machine”. They are to him nothing but the products of a historically biased local Zeitgeist. For him “ethics” today could and should be a technological system of adjusting human conflicts or, at most, a “ethical technology” as he puts it. He at least wants to supplement modern western ideology with such Asian socio-ethical ideas as Confucian communitarianism and Japanese notion of “wa” (peaceful harmony) to diminish human conflicts and establish a globally peaceful world, if possible at all.

(4) Sakamoto’s Semiotics
Sakamoto’s original philosophical concern with logico-mathematical symbolism has gradually led him to philosophy of language and semiotics. His first monograph on the topic was “Philosophical Semiotics” written in 1985. Then he became a member of IASS and read his paper, “Semiotic Possibility in East Asia”, at the Perpignan Congress in 1989, where he got acquainted with Li Xiankun of Hubei University, China. Soon afterwards he challenged a taboo among Indo-european linguists and wrote a book, New Essays concerning the Origin of Language (1991) to link linguistic studies to such research works as in biology, psychology, paleontology, cognitive science, ethnology or sociology to open up a new transdisciplinary science of human language. By this time the pirate copies of his Contemporary Logic (1968) were secretly circulated among several leading Chinese dialectical logicians, which became one of the reasons why he was invited to People’s Republic of China, soon after they opened their gate of academic liberation to ideologically “harmless” foreign scholars. In the autumn of 1992 the first East Asian Semiotic Seminar (EASS) was held in Wuhan, China, under the auspices of Hubei University and, in 1997 when the second EASS was held at East China Normal University in Shanghai, the EAASS was formally established, where Sakamoto was elected as its first president.

Sakamoto has tried to pave the way for “East Asian semiotics” on the basis of Chinese linguistic/conceptual frameworks as represented by Chinese ideography and its semantics. China, Korea and Japan are all supposed to be historically influenced by its linguistic characters, socially and mentally. He compiled a new Encyclopedia of Semiotics (2002), the first full-scale dictionary of semiotics ever published in Japan, after several years’ preparations. And now he and his colleagues are trying to hold the 4th EASS in Mongolia with the intention to expand the scope of East Asia beyond the geographically limited territories of China, Korea and Japan.

Sakamoto’s Main Publications
(Note: Titles of Japanese publications are all translated into English, while those with asterisks are originally written in English.)

Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo