Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics (review)

Any book that attempts, as does the present volume, to capture the entirety of twentieth-century Japanese intellectual discourse within a single analytical framework must—almost by definition—fail in its task. The important question then becomes, what kind of failure does it achieve? Is it an interesting one? Is it useful? Yumiko Iida's Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics measures up quite well in those respects: it is one of the most interesting and useful books on Japanese intellectual history published in recent years.

The book surveys modern Japanese attempts to define a national identity, ranging from the "cultural renaissance" of the 1930s to the more recent historical revisionism of figures such as Katō Norihiro and Fukuda Kazuya. Its chapters are arranged chronologically, organized largely by decades. Each provides a narrative of economic, political, and cultural developments from the period in question and then moves on to analyze the thought of key intellectuals whose works were central to that moment. This sustained effort to historicize intellectual currents allows Iida to map out subtle but important shifts in the form and function of nationalism in Japan across the course of the twentieth century. This narrative framework, along with the succinct summaries provided for various intellectual positions, would make the volume a fine textbook for courses in modern Japanese thought—except that the price of the current edition almost certainly prohibits classroom use.

The book provides intelligent discussions of a number of postwar Japanese intellectuals whose writings are too often neglected in English-language scholarship, including Yoshimoto Takaaki, Takeuchi Yoshimi, and Etō Jun. In other cases, Iida takes up schools of thought that have been explored in more detail elsewhere. Her discussion of the 1930s, for example, focuses largely on the "overcoming modernity" debates and the Japan Romantic School, which are discussed extensively in Harry Harootunian's Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Kevin Doak's Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (University of California Press, 1994). Likewise, her discussion of early postwar liberalism covers terrain explored in greater detail in J. Victor Koschmann's Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Even in these cases, though, Iida does not simply replicate the earlier scholarship. Given the nature of her ambitious argument here, she cannot explore the individual thinkers in the depth that full monographs devoted to each could provide. The primary contribution of the present volume lies in the way it ties various strands of twentieth-century intellectual discourse into a single, coherent argument. This is the source of both the book's considerable interest as well as its occasional excesses.

Iida argues that Japanese nationalism is best understood as a kind of hegemony (in Antonio Gramsci's sense of the word) that has achieved reproduction primarily by way of the aesthetic. This is because "the aesthetic is the domain where the unspeakable stories of the excluded are given voice as a protest against the transformative forces in the modern configuration of thought and social order" (p.3). The aesthetic functions ideologically by promising to restore harmony to the various contradictions and polarities that haunt modern thought, such as subject/object, universal/particular, and logos/pathos. "Thus remedies for the ill effects of the modern were formulated in aesthetic terms... not only as a response to the alleged limitations of modern rationality, but also because the aesthetic was the realm in which the essence of Japanese culture was thought to lie" (p.60). Iida's approach to nationalism via aesthetics allows her to critique it effectively without simply rejecting it as an aberration. She demonstrates, for example, how the romantic nationalisms of the 1930s, the 1960s, and the 1990s all can be understood as attempts to counter the alienation that capitalist development brought to twentieth-century Japan. Despite attempts by cultural nationalists to define a national space that transcends modernity, Iida shows...