Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 16(2)/2019: 31-44
ĀOvercoming Modernity” in Asia? A Critical Review
Jiang SUN School of Government & School of History Nanjing University 163 Xianlin Avenue, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China [email protected]
Abstract: Discussing the issues of “Asia,” Takeuchi Yoshimi’s discourse of “Overcoming Modernity” (䘇ԙ䎻ށ) has received broad attention among the international community of scholars. Commentators try to identify the ideological elements of this discourse that, as they hope, could help to solve post-modern problems. After analysing Takeuchi’s understanding of the war and its context, this paper shows that his discourse of “overcoming modernity” has an anti-historical tendency, which stems from the ideological ambiguity of his attitude towards the question of who was responsible for the war. Keywords: Takeuchi Yoshimi, overcoming modernity, Asianism, understanding of the war
When a new chapter of history began at the end of the last century and “Asia,” “East Asia” and “North-east Asia” suddenly became hot topics among scholars, this fervour covertly fuelled commentators’ hope that the Asian countries would quickly free themselves from the curse of history, transcend the barriers of the nation-state, and form a unified entity. However, in the summer of 2012, the tide turned back and serious conflicts arose between China and Japan, as well as between Korea and Japan, over their territorial claims to a few small islands. After more than ten years, we are facing the same old story once again: the so-called “Asian discourse” has become a mere game of words without specific meaning. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck, in his book Critique and Crisis, explained that the concepts of “critique” and “crisis” have the same Old Greek (krinein; to separate, decide and judge) and Latin (cernere; to sift, discern and decide) roots, which indicate “to discern, judge and decide.” (Koselleck, 1959, 1976: 196-198) If it is true that the emergence of the Asian discourse implied a “crisis” brought about by the age of globalization (the barriers of nation-states have been shaken or hardened?), an examination and critique (in the original sense of the word) of this discourse might allow us to draw some lessons from past historical experience for future possibilities.
© 2019 Jiang SUN - https://doi.org/10.3726/CUL022019.0003 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative 31 Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ Jiang SUN / “Overcoming Modernity” in Asia? A Critical Review
I. TAKEUCHI YOSHIMI’S DISCOURSE
Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977) has occupied the centre of the discussions surrounding the Asian discourse. As a graduate from Tokyo Imperial University in Chinese Studies, he was dissatisfied with Japanese sinologists’ divorce from social reality and in 1934, together with his friend Takeda Taijun, founded the “Chinese Literature Research Society” to promote the study of modern Chinese literature. Near the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, in May 1944, Takeuchi was called up for the Sino-Japanese War and stayed in China, welcoming the surrender of Japan in Yueyang, Hunan Province. After the war he played an active role as a critic and a professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University; he resigned from his professorship in May 1960, however, in protest against the “Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security” signed between the United States and Japan. When the diplomatic relation of China and Japan was normalized in 1972, Takeuchi, out of his dissatisfaction with the all too easy political reconciliation between these two countries, announced that he would give up the study of China and disappeared from the public eye. Apart from researching and translating Lu Xun’s writings, Takeuchi Yoshimi did not have a strong academic standing in the world of Japan’s Chinese studies. Not even as a critic was he outstanding, as his judgements missed the reality of China, during the war as well as after it. Nonetheless, he received more attention than any other sinologists or critics of his time and was praised by commentators from all parts of the political spectrum. After Takeuchi died, the Japanese historian Ienaga Fukuzawa remembered how he had once received a letter from him supporting his lawsuit against the Japanese government in the “Textbook Incident” of 1965: “I admire your heroic resolve; you have the spirit of someone who upholds a crumbling building with a single hand.” (Ienaga, 1980) The right-wing critic Ashizu Uzuhiko, in his ambiguous arguments, approvingly called Takeuchi a “biased master”: “even though I think Takeuchi’s views are one-sided, he certainly has always had my respect.” (Ashizu, 1981) The liberal thinker Maruyama Masao said that Takeuchi’s merit was that he “never forced his views upon others,” which was especially rare in the Japanese society as it tended to impose unanimity by claiming that “we are all Japanese.” (Maruyama, 1996b: 358) Deliberating on these statements, which either express grief upon Takeuchi’s death or praise his particularity
32 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 16(2)/2019: 31-44 during his lifetime, one cannot help noticing that none of them have any direct relationship to his thinking. The most active time for Takeuchi Yoshimi as a critic was the early post-war period. He was mostly inspired by his experiences during the war, so his discourse on Asia developed within a binary framework of East- West, modernity-tradition, and controlling-being controlled. When the Pacific War broke out on December 8th, 1941, Takeuchi was excited, as were many other Japanese intellectuals confused over the invasion of China. In “The Greater East Asia War and Our Resolve,” he rejoiced over the feeling that “history is being made,” the war would unite “the love for the fatherland” and “the love for the neighbour,” and the “China Incident” was a part of the struggle against Europe and the United States for the liberation of Asia (Takeuchi, 1981: 294-298). After the war, when many intellectuals reconsidered and, one after another, “embraced defeat,” (Dower, 1999) Takeuchi Yoshimi firmly maintained his views. In November 1959 he published the long article “Overcoming Modernity,” in which he emphasized the dilemma of “aggression [against China]” and “solidarity [with China]”: “The overcoming of modernity has failed as a matter of fact, but as an idea it is still of significance.” (Takeuchi, 1980: 5) In his “The Japanese View on Asia” published in August 1963, Takeuchi on one hand recognized that Japan had destroyed Korea’s sovereignty and violated China’s; on the other hand, he still maintained that “the invasion was not good, but in it there existed a twisted sense of solidarity”: “no matter how one argues against it, the reality of the aggression [against China] in the Greater East Asian War cannot be denied; however, to deny, just because of the abhorrent aggression, that there was a feeling of solidarity which expressed itself in the invasion, makes one worry that the baby is thrown out with the bath water.” (Takeuchi, 1981a: 118-119) For Takeuchi, the “Greater East Asian War” resembled a Deus ex machina in a Greek tragedy, which would instantly solve Japan’s problem of the East- West and Tradition-Modernity dichotomies in the process of modernization. Almost 20 years after the war, given the condition of a “colonized” Japan under the “Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security,” Takeuchi was still haunted by the illogical absurdity of the war and tried to draw some conclusions from the twisted logic of modernization/westernization. The so-called “modernity” or “modern age” ( 䘇ԙ) refers to a knowledge of one’s own time, as the relatively near “past” is indicative of
33 Jiang SUN / “Overcoming Modernity” in Asia? A Critical Review
“modernity” and the “modern age” exists in today’s “past.” The “Greater East Asian War” (the Pacific War) waged by Japan was euphemistically framed as a way of “overcoming modernity” ( 䘇ԙ䎻ށ). After experiencing the “knowledge shock” of being at war with the U.S. (the U.S. and Great Britain represented Western modernity), 13 scholars organized a symposium under the title of “Intellectual Collaboration Conference” on July 23rd and 24th, 1942. Their papers were published afterwards in the September and October issues of the journal Literary World (Bungakukai ᮽᆜ⮂ :KHQ.DZDNDPL7HW]XWDUŇ one of the most notable participants, explained the purpose of the symposium, he casually used the term “overcoming modernity,” which then became a figure of speech to glorify the war as a way to overcome the problems of the modern age. Takeuchi Yoshimi thought that there were three intellectual groups that eagerly adopted this term: those who were associated with Literary World, the so-called “Japanese Romanticists,” and the members of WKH ´.\ŇWR 6FKRROµ 7DNHXFKL ,I RQH ZDQWV WR SXW WKH discourse of “overcoming modernity” in the broader context of Japan’s modern history, it is not hard to find that it echoed the challenge to Japanese modernity posed by the ideology of the Imperial War; however, actually, it also implied a critique of the existing system, which attracted the attention of the famous Marxist philosopher Hiromatsu Wataru (Hiromatsu, 1989). The ideal of “overcoming modernity” needed the war to realize itself and thus constituted a mere “trick” of thinking; in the end, the theoretical questions brought about by the war only incurred a straight DQVZHU2QWKLVDFFRXQW.DUDWDQL.ŇMLQWXUQHG´RYHUFRPLQJPRGHUQLW\µ into an issue of “aesthetics” and thereby evaded interrogating it as a historical or theoretical phenomenon (Karatani, 1994: 96-122). More than twenty years after his death, Takeuchi Yoshimi suddenly became a celebrity for his discourse on Asia. Researches done outside Japan have moved him out of a Japanese context, and into the centre of the discussion of Asia as a concept. In the same way that Takeuchi had used Lu Xun to criticise Japan, Sun Ge associated Takeuchi with a new mode of thinking: “the real negation must be an internal one”; she tried to introduce Takeuchi as someone who discovered modernity through Lu Xun (Sun, 2005). Then how big is Lu Xun’s suggestive effect after all? As Richard Calichman argued in linking the thinking of Lu Xun with that of Takeuchi, one can only draw on Lu Xun’s critical method to “engage with Takeuchi’s ideas.” (Calichman, 2004: xiii)
34 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 16(2)/2019: 31-44
In fact, Takeuchi and Lu Xun are intellectually similar to each other merely on the surface. Matsumoto Kenichi claims that their difference lies in the fact that “Lu Xun makes the path that should be taken for China’s revolution an object of his critiques, while Takeuchi Yoshimi’s criticism targets Japan’s official ideology.” (Matsumoto, 2005: 209) What is more, although Lu Xun has been widely acknowledged as an antinationalistic thinker, everyone tells a different story regarding Takeuchi. Maruyama Masao thinks that Takeuchi is not a nationalist, but an “internationalist” and a “supporter of cosmopolitanism.” (Maruyama, 1996b: 337) Sun Ge holds the same opinion: “Takeuchi Yoshimi is not a nationalist, even if he states more clearly than any nationalists that his only concern is Japan.” (Sun, 2005: 12) I myself, however, agree with Matsumoto Kenichi’s view that he is “an Asianist nationalist,” since almost all “Asianists” are nationalists in nature. As it turns out, in contrast to Lu Xun’s sharp criticism of Chinese tradition, “Takeuchi’s outlook on traditional Japan clearly exhibits a common attitude of his time, which was based on a legacy it wanted to give up.” (Tsurumi, 2010: 11) In view of this one-sided praise of Takeuchi, Koyasu Nobukuni, in his book What is Overcoming Modernity, pointed out that Takeuchi had subjectively polarized modernism and nationalism; his discourse on Asia abounded with ambiguous ironies, such as “Japan is in Asia, but it is not Asian.” Furthermore, Koyasu Nobukuni argued that Mizoguchi .Ň]ŇLQH[SORULQJ&KLQD·V´PRGHUQLW\µGLVWRUWHG the epistemological meaning of Takeuchi’s “Asia as a method” and turned it into something subservient to his own “China as a method.” (Koyasu, 2008: 13-14, 240-244) Suzuki Sadami’s newly published book Overcoming Modernity — Social Thougts before and during the War, in turn, criticized Koyasu Nobukuni for “not understanding Takeuchi at all” and holding an “anti- historical” tendency (Suzuki, 2015: 360-367). Differences in expounding Takeuchi’s notions are not only those about how to understand history, but also carry a subjective undertone of personal preferences. A review of the researches on Takeuchi shows that, although relevant scholars invariably refer to his discourse on Asia as “overcoming modernity,” almost none of them examine Takeuchi’s Asianism in relation to the historical reality.
35 Jiang SUN / “Overcoming Modernity” in Asia? A Critical Review
II. ASIA AS AN ISM
Apart from “Overcoming Modernity,” the essay “Japan’s Asianism,” published in 1963, is equally important for understanding Takeuchi’s discourse on Asia. After the defeat in the “battle” against the “Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security,” Takeuchi directed his attention to Asianism, which embodies an anti-Western tendency since the Meiji era. In the “What is Asianism” section of this essay, after giving some examples of the dictionary definitions of Asianism, he objected to separating the position of “Asian solidarity,” as upheld by Emori Ueki, 7DUXL7ŇNLFKLDQGņL.HQWDUŇLQWKH3HRSOH·V5LJKWV0RYHPHQWIURPWKDW of the Black Ocean Society’s (⦺⍁⽴) “Greater Asianism,” since this separation was claimed by him to be too “mechanical.” Asianism had something in common with “aggressionism,” nationalism, and internationalism, though differing from them at a glimpse. Modern Japan’s expansionism had given birth to the coexistence of “statism” and “people’s rights” and of “Europeanization” and “national essence,” and Asianism was caught in between. The idea of the “Greater East Asian Co- Prosperity Sphere” in the Second World War, in a certain sense, was its logical end; from a different perspective, however, this idea also represented a “departure” and a “deviation” from Asianism (Takeuchi, 1980: 97-100). If the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was a due “conclusion” as well as a “departure” and a “deviation,” what was the final destination of “Asianism”? Each of Takeuchi’s readers might draw from this “ambiguous irony” whatever he needs. I myself am going to employ Takeuchi’s own approach and, in the same way as Calichman did, comb out his key arguments in order to discuss the historical and cultural basis of “Overcoming Modernity.” 7DUXL7ŇNLFKL·VERRNOn the Unification of East Asia is worth mentioning in this connection. In it, the author presented a ground-breaking proposal: Japan and Korea should, on equal terms, unite with each to form a single state; as the second step, this new political entity should form alliance with China (Tarui, 1976). Though first written in Japanese in 1885, the manuscript was soon lost with the arrest of TŇNLFKL$IWHUKLVUHOHDVHIURP SULVRQ7ŇNLFKLZDQWHG.RUHDQLQWHOOHFWXDOVWREHDEOHWRUHDGKLVERRN and therefore published a Chinese version in 1893. There were not a few people who held similar ideas; in 1887, in a rhymed commentary on Takeyasu KamejiUŇ·VERRNProspects of Countries All over the World, Nakamura
36 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 16(2)/2019: 31-44
Masanao wrote the following sentences in Chinese: “Japan, China and Korea, their union and alliance are as firm as metal and stone; they are as close to each other as jowls and jaws, and as lips and teeth; they are like brothers and sisters”; “The three states get united on the basis of trust and righteousness and they do not fear the hungry tigers’ greed; forcefully, they help each other to rise to the top.” (Nakamura, 1887) In 1889, while studyLQJDEURDGLQ%HUOLQ,QRXH7HWVXMLUŇLQYLWHGVRPH&KLQHVH,QGLDQ and Siamese celebrities to form the “East Asia Association,” in which Zhang Deyi, a Manchu diplomat dispatched by the Qing government, also participated (Zhang, 1997: 99-105). Asia was a concept formulated as opposed to the West; the “Asians,” homogenously subsumed under this concept, were supposed to be able to develop a “feeling of solidarity” based on a shared destiny. After On the Unification of East Asia was introduced into China, Cai Yuanpei, employed by the Hanlin Imperial $FDGHP\FRPPHQWHGDVIROORZV ´>7DUXL7ŇNLFKL@FRQVLVWHQWO\PHDVXUHG all important matters and explored the essence of many of them; it is a real masterpiece.” (Gao, 1984: 79) However, the modern elements (nation, state, territory) in the non-modern discourse of “Asian solidarity” (race, civilization, region) restricted Asianism. On the occasion of the establishment of “Shanghai Asian Association” in 1898, its members declared that “in case of a conflict between members of this association, all should work together to find out a solution until friendly relations are restored.” On this point, Zheng Guanying commented: “Some members of the Japanese delegation do not want to include this article.” (Xia, 1988: 218) In fact, in Takeuchi Yoshimi’s list of famous Asianists, Miyazaki 7ŇWHQ PLJKW EH WKH RQO\ LQWHUQDWLRQDOLVW ZKLOH WKH RWKHUV DUH DOO “expansionists.” When Zhang Binglin (Zhang Taiyan), who had a thorough understanding of Asianism, joined Indians to form the “Asian Solidarity Group” in 1907, he proposed to announce a clear rejection of imperialism and exclude the Japanese (Tang, 1980). The symbolic meaning of this group, which was never put into operation, went beyond its practical significance, because it, ironically, excluded those who first brought up the idea of “Asian solidarity.” The creation of the concept of Asia was always bound to a certain socio- political context. When the suffix -ism was added to Asia, it highlighted this concept’s political nature. In Wilhem Lobscheid’s An English and Chinese Dictionary (1866-69), “ism” was explained as “dao” (䚉) and “li” (⨼); LQ,QRXH7HWVXMLUŇ·VA Glossary of Philosophical Terms (1881), “principle” was
37 Jiang SUN / “Overcoming Modernity” in Asia? A Critical Review translated as “GŇJHQULµ (䚉Ƚ⨼), and “ism” as “shugi” (ѱѿ). Asia was made an ism much later, approximately in the second decade of the 20th century. When we look back at how “Asian solidarity” became “Asianism,” we can find how Asianism, originally, drifted on the edge of the Japanese thinking of “modernity”; when the empire moved from margins to the centre as a major power, Asianism, accordingly, became the crux of the imperial ideology. Korea constituted a mirror of these events. On the SUHWH[WRIUHDOLVLQJ7DUXL7ŇNLFKL·VLGHDORIWKH´8QLILFDWLRQRI(DVW$VLDµ UchidD 5\ŇKHL IURP WKH %ODFN 'UDJRQ 6RFLHW\ WULFNHG WKH .RUHDQ
III. MAX WEBER’S PROJECTION
The Asianism, which was unrelentingly upheld by Takeuchi Yoshimi, posed a heavy burden on Japan, especially, with regard to the question of war responsibility. On June 30th, 2006, at a symposium held in Nagoya and entitled “Re-examining Takeuchi and the Transformation of Methodology,” the famous critic Tsurumi Shunsuke (2007: 44) started his speech with the words: “A comparison of Takeuchi’s method and that of Max Weber could be very interesting; Takeuchi Yoshimi, he took his emotions as the starting point.” In my view, it would be “very interesting”
38 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 16(2)/2019: 31-44 to make a comparison between two men’s understandings of war responsibility: Takeuchi Yoshimi’s and Maruyama Masao’s. The so-called war responsibility indicates the criminal, political, and ethical responsibilities for the war. In 1919, in his lecture to young students in Munich, Max Weber, who had enthusiastically supported Germany during the First World War, put forward the concepts of “ethic of attitude” (Gesinnungsethik) and “ethic of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik). The notes for this lecture were later published under the title “Politics as a Vocation.” (Weber, 2004) According to Weber, the “ethic of attitude” works for actions purely based on intentions and emotions, regardless of possible consequences; the “ethic of responsibility”, in contrast, focuses on the responsibility of an agent for the foreseeable consequences of his actions. In making such a distinction, however, Weber did not want to polarize these two concepts; he thought they could not be separated and should always go together. In view of the responsibility for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, as a nationalist, Weber emphasised the ethic of responsibility, which hinges on the consequences of one’s actions, not considering if his intentions were pure. The questions brought forward by Weber haunted the Japanese intellectual world. In November 1950, the Japanese translation of Karl Jaspers’ The Responsibility for Crimes was published. In this book, Jaspers argued that there are four categories that should be distinguished regarding the guilt of the German people: criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt. The criminal guilt should receive punishment; the political guilt should be investigated and the responsible parties should pay the price, even deprived of their political power and rights; the question of how to gain insights into the moral guilt could lead to its invisibility and moral regeneration; the metaphysical guilt is felt by one’s consciousness when he faces God, which can be revived by introspection and thereby become the source of a new way of life (Jaspers, 1950: 66-67). Jaspers’ writings provoked new discussions over the question of war responsibility among Japanese intellectuals. In January 1959, Tsurumi Shunsuke, in “The Issue of War Responsibility”, pointed out that before 1955, the Tokyo Trials, the dismissal of state officials, and the legal and educational reforms had created an institutionalised “consciousness of war responsibility”; after 1955, however, the abolition or invalidation of these institutions eliminated this consciousness (Tsurumi, 1991: 159-172).
39 Jiang SUN / “Overcoming Modernity” in Asia? A Critical Review
To challenge the understanding of war responsibility in the early 1950s, Maruyama Masao published “Blind Spot in the Theory of War Responsibility” in March 1956. He criticised “the universal repentance of one hundred million people” as a result of the intrigue of the ruling class that dyed all Japanese civilians in “black squid ink”; at the same time, he also criticised the opposite point of view, which declared very few people guilty and exempted the rest. He insisted that “to distinguish between the ruling class and the commoners is good, but if we do so, we cannot by any means deny the war responsibility of the common people — those who are ruled.” Domestically, as he argued, the Japanese fascists’ rule, in contrast to that of Nazi Germany, was not based on democracy; however, the question whether “ordinary people” as citizens could avoid the “moral responsibility of submitting to the fascists” still merits discussion. In this sense, Jasper’s argument that German people have to first become aware of their own responsibility before they can obtain a political awakening can be also applied to Japan (Maruyama, 1995: 160-161). Then, Maruyama Masao discussed the question of war responsibility between the two extremes, the Emperor and the Communist Party. He pointed out that the International Military Tribunal for the Far East did not investigate the Emperor out of political considerations; but no matter what kind of “apolitical” position he held, he could not shirk his political responsibility, and he was the symbol of the “moral decadence” of the post-war Japanese society. Regarding the Communist Party of Japan, which opposed the Japanese fascists and was thus repressed during the war, Maruyama Masao claimed that it needed to reflect on why it, as an avant-garde political power, was not able to effectively organise anti-Fascist and anti-imperialist mass movements, and why it was not able to subdue its inner conflicts and band together with the Social Democrats and the Liberals in order to form a United Front (Maruyama, 1995: 161-165). In “On the War Responsibility,” a treatise published in February 1960, Takeuchi Yoshimi, after reviewing Maruyama Masao and Tsurumi Shunsuke’s viewpoints, likewise opposed the Japanese society’s growing tendency to evade the question of war responsibility. He argued that the war could not but be recognised as a challenge to Western civilization, but before reaching the ultimate end, the question of war responsibility needed to be better analysed. As he sharply pointed out, “the guiltier someone is, the weaker his sense of guilt might be, which is, basically, a natural law.” (Takeuchi, 1980: 213) Then, Takeuchi repeated his argument in
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“Overcoming Modernity”: the Pacific War in its nature “was a war of aggression, but it was also an Imperialist war against Imperialists.” (Takeuchi, 1980: 216) He went further to deny the generalization of war crimes: “The crimes objectively exist, but unless the responsibility is recognized on a subjective level to form a ‘consciousness of responsibility,’ there will be no way of proving the existence of war crimes”; “only if it is discussed for which parts of the war we should take responsibilities can the discussion on war responsibility be productive.” (Takeuchi, 1980: 217) Although Takeuchi Yoshimi expressed support for Maruyama Masao’s understanding of war responsibility, in fact, they differed subtly in their views. Maruyama Masao condemned the Japanese social elites as an “irresponsible group” and traced early Asianism back to its (Japanese Fascist) origin (Maruyama, 1997: 8), despite the fact that Asianism was exactly what he wanted to promote.1 While Maruyama Masao intended to retrieve from Fukuzawa Yukichi the “reason” lost in Japanese modernity, he thought that it was precisely this “reason” that needed to be criticised (overcome).2 In discussing the modernization of Japan, Takeuchi argued that it had brought the people into a state of “enslavement”. According to the logic embodied in the statement that “unless the responsibility is recognized on a subjective level to form a ‘consciousness of responsibility,’ there will be no way of proving the existence of war crimes,” the people, or the “slaves,” are not only innocent, but also victimized under the ´VWUXFWXUDO VODYHU\µ RI WKH 7HQQŇ V\VWHP 7KLV LV H[DFWO\ DQ ´HWKLF of attitude” as criticised by Max Weber.
IV. CONCLUSION
This paper discusses Takeuchi Yoshimi’s understanding of the war, the “historical” foundation of this understanding, and his view of war responsibility. All these three questions are interrelated and prove to be important for a probe into Takeuchi’s thinking. As a tentative conclusion, we can make the following statement: Takeuchi Yoshimi does not belong to Asia, but to Japan; to move him from Japan into the discursive centre of Asia is inappropriate. The Asia of which Takeuchi is speaking, no matter as an idea or a method, has nothing to do with Asia. The Japanese version of Asianism he eagerly promotes is built upon an absent “Other.”
41 Jiang SUN / “Overcoming Modernity” in Asia? A Critical Review
Frankly speaking, Takeuchi, who had first-hand experience of the war, lingered in the nightmare of Japanese modernity in the post-war period; he boldly faced the defeat, reflecting upon and criticising the path of modernization taken by Japan since the age of Fukuzawa Yukichi. However, he was also unwilling to accept the defeat and clung to an “ethic of attitude.” His interpretation of Japan’s aggression against China as an act of solidarity betrayed his false understanding of the war. He became a hot topic of research just when historical and anti-historical revisionism fought with each other over their ramified understandings of the war; Takeuchi’s ambiguous view on the war and the question of responsibility offered a safe place for the “silent mass,” that is to say, the intellectuals. Thus, when territorial conflicts erupted between China, Japan and Korea in 2012, Takeuchi’s discourse on Asia seemed ineffective and useless. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s.” The commentator’s Asian identity instantly dissolved in their identification with their own nations. From the perspective of global history, the discourse on Asia entails a “methodological turn.” Unless one adopts a “rational” attitude and thoroughly bids farewell to the historical Asianism, any reproduction of the old-fashioned discourse on Asia is meaningless. Takeuchi has become a hot topic for the social public to discuss just when Japan’s dependence on the United States and controversies over the understanding of history between China, Korea and Japan are notably intensified. If Takeuchi still lived today, what would he possibly say about Asianism proposed by himself?
Notes
Translated by Stefan Christ, Department of Chinese Language and Culture, University of Hamburg. Grammatically proofread by Stephen Roddy, University of San Francisco.
1 Hayashi Fusao went even further than Takeuchi Yoshimi and, in his defense of the “Greater East Asian War,” harshly criticised Maruyama Masao. See Hayashi Fusao, 'DL7ŇD6HQVŇ.ŇWHL5RQཝᶧӒᡜҿ㛥ᇐ䄌, pp. 231-241. 2 Maruyama Masao once said: “[He] criticises Japan’s modernity for taking Fukuzawa’s path; this is completely contrary to my view on this point: I try to learn as much as possible from Fukuzawa and thereby criticise Japan’s modernity.” See Maruyama Masao, “Yoshimi San ni tsuite no Danwa ླɳʱʉʂɢʄʌ䃽䂧,” in Maruyama 0DVDR6KşѮኧⵕ⭭䳼(9), p. 339.
42 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 16(2)/2019: 31-44
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㿁ʌ⌦ᯍ” in 7DNHXFKL 43 Jiang SUN / “Overcoming Modernity” in Asia? A Critical Review Suzuki, Sadami. Kindai no Chokoku — 6HQ]HQă6HQFKşQR6KLVŇ 䘇ԙʌ䎻ށ——ᡜࢃ·ᡜ ѣʌᙓᜩ7ŇN\Ň 6DNXKLQVKD Takeuchi, Yoshimi. 7DNHXFKL 44