Afterword: Japanese Modernism Today

Afterword: Japanese Modernism Today Almost a century and a half after the Meiji Revolution (which was disguised as an imperial ‘restoration’) the concepts of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ have worn rather thin. One might even say that they now seem a little old hat. The world continues to change – even more profoundly or frenetically than before – but we have become so used to constant change as a basic condition of ‘modern life’, in everything from fashion and technology to current jargon and social mores, that it hardly seems worth remarking upon. In other words, we are now so far removed from ‘tradition’ that we feel little need for contrary terms such as ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’. The terms ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’, although useful to some extent, perhaps represent, in the final analysis, only a feeble attempt to revive the moribund freshness or sense of novelty and excitement once possessed by the word ‘modern’ and its various derivatives. Without ‘tradition, ‘modernity’ has little meaning or function. In the Japanese case in particular, another major dif- ference between ‘now’ and ‘then’ is that, today, Japan is no longer a net ‘importer of modernity’ but is itself 276 Afterword: Japanese Modernism Today 277 a major agent of global change. In the past few decades there has been a momentous shift in the cultural ‘bal- ance of power’ between East and West, with Japan, and increasingly its larger East Asian cousin China, a major contributor to the new global economy and culture of the 21st century. Although it still continues to absorb foreign cultural influences, like every other country, Japan itself now represents ‘cutting-edge modernity’ to the rest of the world, and especially to its Asian neighbours. It no longer looks so much to the West for models to emulate, but has itself become, in many fields, the object of imitation. Thus it is perhaps hardly surprisingly that contem- porary Japanese writers and artists, such as the ‘two Murakamis’, evince none of the transnational ‘anxiety of influence’ that so much troubled their predecessors. No longer perceiving any great cultural divide between East and West, or between tradition and modernity, they naturally feel completely at home in the hybrid global culture of the 21st century and hardly seem to spare a thought for ‘national origins’. Japan today, of course, plays an important role in all our lives, as an economic superpower and as a major contributor to 21st-century global culture. But its historical experience of modernity is of wider interest for a number of other reasons too. As a once-remote non- Western society that existed in relative isolation and evolved its own distinctive culture for centuries before its sudden ‘opening’ to Western modernity in the mid- 19th century, Japan provides almost a ‘textbook case’ under almost uncontaminated ‘laboratory conditions’ of the ways in which modernity radically transforms societies and cultures and the political, social, cultural, 278 Modernism and Japanese Culture and psychological responses such transformations can elicit. Furthermore, Japan is in a unique position, historically speaking, as a country that has been both pas- sive recipient and active agent of modernity. From the very earliest phase of their modern encounter with the West, the Japanese have helped to define what modernity is, for Westerners as well as for themselves. Thus a deeper understanding of ‘Japanese modernity’ will help us, in more ways than one, understand our own experience of this crucial phenomenon in the West. Notes Introduction: Modernity and Modernism in a Japanese Context 1 The photograph may be viewed on Wikipedia under ‘To– kaido– ’. 2 Wilde, The Artist as Critic, p. 315. 3 The exact state of the ‘modernity’ of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) is a matter of dispute among historians, with the recent consensus being that it was ‘early modern’ rather than ‘premodern’, and that consequently the mid-19th-century ‘opening to the West’ only accelerated a historical process that was already in progress. Although politically Tokugawa Japan was clearly feudal- istic, socioculturally and even economically, as I shall argue later, it had already begun to ‘modernize’. But, of course, a Western visitor of the 1850s would not have noticed this: to him or her Japan would have seemed to be caught in a ‘medieval’ time-warp. 4 The reasons for this are historically and culturally complex and beyond the scope of the present book, but to list just a few of the more obvious ones: the quick achievement of a high degree of national unity and national consensus in the early Meiji period, a high level of literacy and national education, and intelligent, effective leadership at the top, including from the elite government bureaucracy, combined with a high level of social discipline and work ethic among the people at large. 5 Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, p. 94. 6 This view is, in fact, somewhat over-simplified and needs significant qualification. The onset of modernity was not so sudden an event as once thought: as we shall see in Part II, we also need to be cognizant of the irony that ‘Western modernism’ itself, in the realm of the arts, was substantially shaped by Japanese aesthetic traditions. A good argument could even be made that aesthetic modernism, which ultimately became a global phenomenon, actually had its beginnings in late 17th-century Japan. 7 Griffin, Series Preface, in Turda, Modernism and Eugenics, p. ix. 279 280 Notes Part I Constructing ‘Modernity’ and ‘Tradition’: Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Meiji Japan, 1868–1912 Chapter 1 Constructing Meiji Modernity 1 See Marius Jansen in The Cambridge History of Japan, p. 337. 2 W.G. Beasley, The Japanese Experience, p. 225. 3 The Confucian scholar Aizawa Seishisai wrote the polemical tract that had the deepest and most widespread influence on the young revolutionary leaders of the Meiji Restoration (and also on later Japanese nationalists), New Theses (Shinron, 1825), the main source for the ideology of sonno– jo–i (‘expel the barbarian, revere the emperor’) and kokutai (‘national essence’). ‘It was a virtual bible to activists….’ See Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti- Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825, p. iv. 4 Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 13. 5 Ibid., p. 8. 6 Ibid. 7 Henshall, A History of Japan, pp. 71–2. 8 Ibid., p. 13. 9 Ibid., p. 15. 10 Fred G. Notehelfer, Sources of Japanese Tradition, pp. 17–18. 11 Hirakawa, in The Cambridge History of Japan, p. 462. 12 Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, p. 321. 13 Ibid., p. 322. 14 Apart from Fukuzawa, another famous Japanese expression of this link between ‘individualism’ and ‘modernity’ was by the leading Meiji writer, Natsume So– seki, in his 1914 talk, ‘My Individualism’ (Watakushi no kojin-shugi). (See Natsume 2005). On the other side of the coin, of course, modernity was also blamed for the emergence of ‘mass man’ in the early 20th century. 15 See Masako Gavin, in Starrs, Japanese Cultural Nationalism, p. 203. 16 Y. Takahashi ‘Nihon jinshu kairyo– ron’, Meiji bunka shiyo– so–sho 6 (Tokyo: Kazama Shobo, 1961), p. 49. 17 Ibid., p. 46. 18 Ibid., p. 17. Rumi Sakamoto, ‘Race-ing Japan’, in Starrs, Japanese Cultural Nationalism, pp. 185–6. 19 Turda, Modernism and Eugenics, pp. 4–6. Notes 281 20 Griffin, Series Preface, in Turda, Modernism and Eugenics, p. xiv. 21 See Sakamoto, ‘Race-ing Japan’, in Starrs, Japanese Cultural Nationalism, pp. 180–5. 22 Ibid., p. 185. 23 Yo– Hirayama, Fukuzawa Yukichi no Shinjitsu (The Truth about Fukuzawa Yukichi, 2004), argues that an editor of Fukuzawa’s Complete Works in the 1920s and ’30s erroneously included unsigned editorials written by Fukuzawa’s colleagues, including the datsu-A ron article. 24 Sakamoto, ‘Race-ing Japan’, in Starrs, Japanese Cultural Nationalism, p. 182. 25 Ibid. 26 Beasley, The Japanese Experience, p. 225. 27 Kanagaki, ‘The Beefeater’, in Keene, ed., Modern Japanese Literature, pp. 31–2. 28 Hattori, ‘The Western Peep Show’, in Keene, ed., Modern Japanese Literature, p. 34. 29 Ibid., p. 35. 30 Stanley-Baker, Japanese Art, p. 192. Chapter 2 The Anti-Modernist Backlash: Constructing Meiji Tradition 1 For a fictional depiction of these groups, see Mishima Yukio’s novel, Runaway Horses. 2 Walter Skya has pointed to the numerous other affinities between Japanese (Shinto– ) and Islamic ‘religious terrorism’. See Skya, Japan’s Holy War, pp. 3–5. 3 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (quoted in Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, p. 19). 4 Mitford himself was a significant figure; he went on to write Tales of Old Japan, which includes the story of the 47 ro–nin, and shows his own keen awareness that he was witnessing the van- ishing of ‘old Japan’. He was also the grandfather of the cele- brated Mitford sisters. 5 Mitford, Mitford’s Japan, p. 87. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., pp. 87–8. 8 Ibid., p. 86. 9 Ibid., p. 250. 10 Satow, A Diplomat in Japan, p. 343. 11 Ibid., p. 344. 12 Mitford, Mitford’s Japan, p. 250. 282 Notes 13 Ibid. 14 The most striking ‘modern myth’ associated with the ‘death of samurai tradition’ as one of the immediate and most obvious consequences of Japan’s ‘modernization’ is that of Saigo– Taka- mori (1827–1877), sometimes called the ‘last samurai’. He was not the first nor the last Japanese nationalist/patriot to have an ambivalent attitude towards ‘modernization’: at first one of the central pillars of the new Meiji government, he then turned against his fellow modernizers when they took a step too far, issuing a decree that disestablished and outlawed the very samurai class itself in 1876.

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