Gilles Kepel: Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West

Book review: Gilles Kepel: Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020, 376 pp.

Encounters and Engagement in the Civilizational Analysis of Japan

As a field of significant activity for historical sociologists in recent decades, civilizational analysis has produced extensive and incisive works examining Japan as a historical formation of Eurasia. However, the same cannot be said of Japan’s Pacific relationship with the United States, which is neglected in the major historical sociologies of Japanese modernity. This essay seeks to address that unnecessary oversight by putting that relationship into focus as an international dimension of the institution of both states. It would be tempting to elucidate the entanglement of the two as an encounter of civilizations, but the author instead casts it as intercivilizational engagement, that is a deeper set of connections generated by routine contacts and migratory movements, trade in commerce and culture, and selective appropriation of models of statehood. Delineating the lines of exchange in all four domains of connectivity between Japan and the US, the essay profiles the international and imperial extensions of both states. In altering the perspective on Japan’s relations with the world, the author outlines a larger potential historical sociology of intercivilizational engagement between two Pacific-edge civilizational constellations.

A Perspective for Japan: Fukuzawa Yukichi’s “Theory of Civilization”, 1875

This paper discusses the thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi, probably the most influential Japanese intellectual of the late nineteenth century, with particular reference to his attempt to develop a theory of civilization. For him, the civilizational approach was a framework for reflection on Japan’s situation in the world after the great changes of the 1850s and 1860s. He saw the preservation of national independence and the reform of Japanese society as primary goals, but they necessitated extensive learning from the experience and achievements of more advanced societies, especially those of Western Europe and the United States. However, he did not advocate a purely imitative Westernization. Japan’s distinctive identity and autonomous international stance were to be maintained. To clarify the reasons for transforming Japan in light of Western models without capitulating to them, he outlined an evolutionary conception of social change, understood in terms of an advance towards civilization. That kind of progress was not only a matter of technical and organizational development; it also involved the mobilization of whole peoples. On this basis, Fukuzawa articulated a more democratic vision of Japan’s future than the road subsequently taken by the Meiji government.

Modern Japan and Multiple Modernities: A Case Study

Transformation studies should be a key topic for the comparative analysis of civilizations. Their most important task is to deal with the changes to world-views and cultural semantics inherited from axial traditions, changes resulting from the emergence of modern society and its radically innovative normative turn. To put it another way, the question relates to modern discursive reworkings of path-dependent figures of thought. In the context of such processes, discourses on identity intertwine with more or less critically oriented discourses on culture and society. For non-European countries, and very emphatically for Japan, Northwestern Europe is an almost exclusive domain of reference, notwithstanding eventual condemnations of European “decadence” or – as the case may be – capitalist contradictions. But when some critical distance from Europe is achieved, it combines easily with returns to a supposedly primordial native legacy, even with the illusory belief that this legacy can inspire a transformative creation of something new in human history. Such intellectual phenomena occur, with significant variations, across a broad political spectrum. This essay discusses a few exemplary Japanese cases.

Bringing Japan back in

Editorial

Jóhann Páll Árnason: The Labyrinth of Modernity. Horizons, Pathways and Mutations

Book review: Jóhann Páll Árnason: The Labyrinth of Modernity. Horizons, Pathways and Mutations. Lanham – Boulder – New York – London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020, 230 pp.

The Symposium on Overcoming Modernity and Discourse in Wartime Japan

The symposium on overcoming modernity (kindai no chōkoku) that took place in Tokyo in 1942 has been much commented upon, but later critics have tended to over-emphasize the wartime political context and the ideological connection to Japanese ultra-nationalism. Closer examination shows that the background and the actual content of the discussion were more complicated. The idea of overcoming modernity had already appeared in debates among Japanese intellectuals before the war, and was always open to different interpretations; it could indicate Japanese ambitions to move beyond Western paradigms of modernity, but in other cases it referred to more radical visions of alternatives to modernity as such. Some versions linked up with Western critiques of existing modernity, including traditionalist as well as more future-oriented ones. These differentiations are evident in the symposium, and associated with diverse schools of thought. An important input came from representatives of the Kyoto school, the most distinctive current in twentieth-century Japanese philosophy. Despite the suppression of Marxist thought, the background influence of the unorthodox Marxist thinker Miki Kiyoshi was significant. Another major contribution came from the group known as the Japan Romantic School, active in literature and literary criticism. Other intellectuals of widely varying persuasions, from outspoken nationalists to Catholic theologians, also participated. The result was a rich but also thoroughly inconclusive discussion, from which no consensus on roads beyond modernity could emerge.

Adam Tooze: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World; Adam Tooze: Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy

Book reviews: Adam Tooze: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. London: Allen Lane, 2018, 218 pp. Adam Tooze: Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy. London: Allen Lane, 2021, 368 pp.

Amorphization amid Fragmentation: Japanese Society 1990–2020

This paper sketches the major sociological transformations of Japanese society of the last three decades, 1990–2020, which can be regarded as a crucial turning point in Japan’s history. It first examines the marked paradigm changes that have occurred in Japanese studies. The paper then endeavours to unravel how such alterations reflect the structural changes caused by the penetration of neoliberalism, the decline of the manufacturing industry, and the expansion of cultural capitalism. After illustrating how these forces have fragmented social relations, the paper ends with a description of how Japanese society is becoming increasingly amorphous in its social structures and value orientations. The paper attempts to cast the shifts of these three decades into relief against the background of the previous three decades, 1960–1989, when Japan enjoyed spectacular economic growth.