New Times in Modern Japan (review)

The specter of Yanagita Kunio haunts Japanese cultural history. Recent studies by Gerald Figal, H. D. Harootunian, Marilyn Ivy, and others have examined the epistemology of loss in Yanagita's writing and diagnosed its symptoms. But if the nostalgic sensibility in Yanagita's native ethnology has been deconstructed, the nostalgic affliction itself has not been overcome. Those of us who do cultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan and some who work on earlier periods still find ourselves crossing Yanagita's rhetorical terrain and grappling with the impulse toward romantic, nostalgist habits of thought. Perhaps this is inevitable. The historiographic turn since the 1970s toward a focus on discourse and everyday practices has encouraged a general perception that the Meiji period saw a cultural revolution. The legacy of Yanagita, who devoted his career to illuminating what had been lost in the process, has hardly been exhausted, particularly in English-language scholarship.¹ Yet if we can deconstruct the nostalgic worldview in Yanagita, surely it is at least as important to the enterprise of modern Japanese studies to examine it in ourselves.

These thoughts are prompted by Stefan Tanaka's ambitious, intriguing, and ultimately frustrating book, New Times in Modern Japan, which seeks to explain the emergence of the sense of linear time itself and therefore by inference of everything that makes modernity modern. New Times is not a study of Yanagita. Nor are Tanaka's and Yanagita's historiographic agendas the same. Indeed, Yanagita is cited only once—early in the opening chapter—and even here the voice is not that of Yanagita himself. This citation is revealing of a shared sensibility, however. Tanaka quotes approvingly a passage from the 1957 English summary translation (by Charles Terry) of a work edited by Yanagita, Japanese Manners and Customs in the Meiji Era. The passage in turn quotes Ogawa Tameji's Kaika mondō (1873) lamenting the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, observing that the old lunar calendar accorded with nature and the habits of everyday life, and concluding that "since the revision . . . nothing is the way it should be" (p. 8). These words then provide the title for Tanaka's second chapter.

Where does historical investigation lead if one's aim is a generalized critique of modernity? For Yanagita Kunio, it led to gathering traces from a lost world, inflected by unabashed nostalgia. For Tanaka, it leads to reading all manifestations of enlightenment rationalism, of empirical science, of historical thought, and of the framing of intellectual disciplines as instruments of the modern nation-state. But this is not a Foucauldian approach either, because Tanaka is not talking explicitly about power, either in visible or invisible forms. What, indeed, are the sources or channels of power in this study of changing consciousness? At some points, the answer appears to be Western experts. Elsewhere, it is less clear.

The six main chapters of New Times chart a broad terrain of Meiji intellectual history, as Tanaka explores the problem of temporality from multiple angles. A battery of European theories of modernity is brought to bear on the subject en route. Although the argument sometimes wanders off course, by the end Tanaka has guided readers through a strikingly original examination of modern temporalities, ranging over numerous thinkers and texts. We begin in the early 1870s, at a time when the value of the past to the new regime was still in flux. The introduction and first chapter look at the beginnings of officially sponsored preservation of historical artifacts with the survey of Tōdaiji's Shōsōin storehouse, the temporal break marked by calendar revision, and the introduction of Western archaeological and geological knowledge by foreign experts, which compelled Japanese intellectuals to grapple with the idea of a native past predating the eras of recorded history and national mythology. Chapter two looks at the folk world that was exorcised to create what Tanaka calls the "secular and antiseptic modern world" (p. 55), focusing particularly on the legend of the child-demon shuten d...