This long-awaited work explores the place of kokugaku (rendered here as "nativism") during Japan's Tokugawa period. Kokugaku, the sense of a distinct and sacred Japanese identity, appeared in the eighteenth century in reaction to the pervasive influence of Chinese culture on Japan. Against this influence, nativists sought a Japanese sense of difference grounded in folk tradition, agricultural values, and ancient Japanese religion. H. D. Harootunian treats nativism as a discourse and shows how it functioned ideologically in Tokugawa Japan.

Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism

History

Harootunian, Harry D.

Asia

University of Chicago Press

In the decades between the two World Wars, Japan made a dramatic entry into the modern age, expanding its capital industries and urbanizing so quickly as to rival many long-standing Western industrial societies. How the Japanese made sense of the sudden transformation and the subsequent rise of mass culture is the focus of Harry Harootunian's fascinating inquiry into the problems of modernity. Here he examines the work of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who, like their European counterparts, saw modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless change that uprooted the dominant historical culture from its fixed values and substituted a culture based on fantasy and desire. Harootunian not only explains why the Japanese valued philosophical understandings of these events, often over sociological or empirical explanations, but also locates Japan's experience of modernity within a larger global process marked by both modernism and fascism.
 What caught the attention of Japanese thinkers was how the production of desire actually threatened historical culture. These intellectuals sought to "overcome" the materialism and consumerism associated with the West, particularly the United States. They proposed versions of a modernity rooted in cultural authenticity and aimed at infusing meaning into everyday life, whether through art, memory, or community. Harootunian traces these ideas in the works of Yanagita Kunio, Tosaka Jun, Gonda Yasunosuke, and Kon Wajiro, among others, and relates their arguments to those of such European writers as George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille.
 Harootunian shows that Japanese and European intellectuals shared many of the same concerns, and also stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its late entry into the capitalist, industrial scene should cause historians to view its experience of modernity as an oddity. The author argues that strains of fascism ran throughout most every country in Europe and in many ways resulted from modernizing trends in general. This book, written by a leading scholar of modern Japan, amounts to a major reinterpretation of the nature of Japan's modernity.

Overcome by Modernity

Princeton University Press

The transition between the reign of the powerful emperor Meiji and that of his weak successor Taishō was marked by the emergence of a new individualism in Japanese society, a separation of culture and politics that led to the demise of the traditional Japanese self-dedication to the interests of the state and to a corresponding dedication to modernization in all spheres of existence. The widespread social, political, economic, and cultural changes that occurred during the years of Japan's modernization movement in the early twentieth century are discussed in thirteen essays by Japanese and American scholars concerned with the Taishō period.The contributors employ a diversity of disciplinary and historical approaches: the volume contains essays on intellectual, literary, economic, diplomatic, political, and social history covering the period from 1900 to 1945. The essays relate the new individualism of the Taishō years to such phenomena as literary naturalism, political socialism, the failure of economic expansion, and industrial and agricultural unrest.

Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho Democracy

Silberman, Bernard S.

In the decades between the two World Wars, Japan made a dramatic entry into the modern age, expanding its capital industries and urbanizing so quickly as to rival many long-standing Western industrial societies. How the Japanese made sense of the sudden transformation and the subsequent rise of mass culture is the focus of Harry Harootunian's fascinating inquiry into the problems of modernity. Here he examines the work of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who, like their European counterparts, saw modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless change that uprooted the dominant historical culture from its fixed values and substituted a culture based on fantasy and desire. Harootunian not only explains why the Japanese valued philosophical understandings of these events, often over sociological or empirical explanations, but also locates Japan's experience of modernity within a larger global process marked by both modernism and fascism. What caught the attention of Japanese thinkers was how the production of desire actually threatened historical culture. These intellectuals sought to "overcome" the materialism and consumerism associated with the West, particularly the United States. They proposed versions of a modernity rooted in cultural authenticity and aimed at infusing meaning into everyday life, whether through art, memory, or community. Harootunian traces these ideas in the works of Yanagita Kunio, Tosaka Jun, Gonda Yasunosuke, and Kon Wajiro, among others, and relates their arguments to those of such European writers as George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille. Harootunian shows that Japanese and European intellectuals shared many of the same concerns, and also stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its late entry into the capitalist, industrial scene should cause historians to view its experience of modernity as an oddity. The author argues that strains of

Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan

Empire and imperialism have returned with a vengeance—not as a set of ideas and practices to be exhumed by the historians, but as paradigms for twenty-first-century living. Harry Harootunian turns his unrelenting gaze to signs of the new imperialism in the world—from the United States’ occupation of Iraq to other supposed terrorist enclaves around the globe. The arguments being made today for imperialism’s historical and contemporary value echo earlier rationales for modernization theory and its conception of “development” during the heyday of the Cold War. Harootunian decisively cuts through the layers to reveal that under the new clothes, it’s the same empire.

The Empire's New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained

Americas

Prickly Paradigm Press