By Harry D. Harootunian
In the many years among the 2 international Wars, Japan made a dramatic access into the trendy age, increasing its capital industries and urbanizing so speedy as to rival many long-standing Western commercial societies. How the japanese made feel of the unexpected transformation and the next upward thrust of mass tradition is the point of interest of Harry Harootunian's attention-grabbing inquiry into the issues of modernity. the following he examines the paintings of a iteration of eastern intellectuals who, like their eu opposite numbers, observed modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless switch that uprooted the dominant old tradition from its fastened values and substituted a tradition according to delusion and hope. Harootunian not just explains why the japanese valued philosophical understandings of those occasions, frequently over sociological or empirical causes, but in addition locates Japan's event of modernity inside of a bigger international technique marked through either modernism and fascism.
What stuck the eye of eastern thinkers used to be how the creation of hope really threatened ancient tradition. those intellectuals sought to "overcome" the materialism and consumerism linked to the West, quite the USA. They proposed models of a modernity rooted in cultural authenticity and geared toward infusing which means into lifestyle, even if via paintings, reminiscence, or neighborhood. Harootunian lines those rules within the works of Yanagita Kunio, Tosaka Jun, Gonda Yasunosuke, and Kon Wajiro, between others, and relates their arguments to these of such ecu writers as George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille.
Harootunian exhibits that eastern and ecu intellectuals shared a number of the similar matters, and in addition stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its past due access into the capitalist, commercial scene should still reason historians to view its adventure of modernity as an oddity. the writer argues that lines of fascism ran all through so much each kingdom in Europe and in lots of methods resulted from modernizing traits quite often. This booklet, written by way of a number one student of recent Japan, quantities to an immense reinterpretation of the character of Japan's modernity.
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Extra resources for Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan
Sample text
27 In Japan, no less than in industrializing societies like France, Germany, and Italy, as memory of the war receded and the harsh sacrifices exacted by two earlier wars with China and Russia faded, the heroism of production was being replaced by heroic consumption. What resulted was not so much a clash between newer and established values as a struggle of desire against values in general. For ordinary people in the 1920s, the “pluck of Meiji” and the obsession with “rising in the world” (risshin shusse) (as Earl Kinmonth has so aptly described this earlier petit bourgeois ideology, “making it”) that seemed to encapsulate so much of the Meiji march to realize “wealth and power” and encourage endless deprivation gave way to the search for comfort and pleasure, leisure and play.
Until 1913 capital industries such as branches of heavy industry were not profitable in the world market, and Japan was in no position to compete with more developed industrial societies. Moreover, the country had not yet recovered from the expenses of the earlier Russo-Japanese War. But all of this was to change as Japan became a member of the allied coalition but was spared any active involvement in the theater of fighting (excepting small operations in North China and the Pacific Islands). During the war, the economy enjoyed a positive boom and relative prosperity because of its role as a supplier to the allied cause.
The new modern life was figured first in discourse, as fantasy, before it was ubiquitously lived as experience, and its major elements were independent women, commodities, and mass consumption. What this fantasizing discourse inadvertently inspired was not only the fear of progressive social disorder and conflict but also the growing sense that the processes guaranteeing cultural reproduction (not to forget biological reproduction) were in danger of disappearing altogether. If the formation of mass culture produced overdetermination as the historical sign of the crisis of social indeterminacy, the modern girl was its contemporary trope.
