Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan (review)

Since the rise of post-colonialism and the critique of Eurocentrism in the 1990s, scholars have increasingly questioned the significance of European modernity. A recent example of this trend is Dipesh Chakrabarty's well-received book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), which criticizes Eurocentric visions of the world. However, scholars often overlook that in 1942, in the midst of World War II, a group of Japanese intellectuals from different backgrounds organized a symposium that anticipated contemporary discussions about modernity. The symposium was entitled "Overcoming Modernity" (kindai no chōkoku) and is now available in this well-crafted translation by Richard Calichman. In addition to a translation of the text, Calichman provides readers with an interpretive introduction, in which he develops a philosophical critique of the various participants' attempts to theorize how to overcome modernity.

As Calichman explains, the symposium was attended by three different groups of intellectuals: the Kyoto School philosophers, such as Nishitani Keiji; members of the Romantic School (nihon rōman ha), such as Hayashi Fusao; and members of the Literary World Group, such as Kobayashi Hideo. Intellectuals from these different factions specialized in various areas including philosophy, literature, music, and physics. Calichman has translated all of the twelve short symposium statements, along with the two round-table discussions at the end of the symposium. Reading the various statements in the volume, one is struck by the breadth of the topics covered, from film, philosophy, music, theology, and even extending to science. However, the writings coalesce around a concern about what was happening to Japan as it confronted European modernity. The above formulation resembles a question that Asian scholars and officials pose even today, namely, can Asian countries remain themselves and at the same time be modern?

In his introduction to this volume, Calichman argues that one must understand the various statements in the symposium from a philosophical perspective, which can grasp how the various participants attempted to affirm Japanese identity while overlooking the philosophical conditions that make identity possible. In short, Calichman claims that most of the participants were worried that Japanese identity was being contaminated by Western modernity, and thus they sought some type of return to a pure Japanese essence or identity. We can see this in Hayashi Fusao's imperative, "Japanese literature, return to your true nature!" (p. 110).

Drawing on Jacques Derrida, Calichman contends that the participants of the symposium did not realize that identity is always already contaminated by the Other, and thus pure identity is an oxymoron. Moreover, in Calichman's view, because this contamination does not happen in time, we must understand this logic of identity and contamination by means of philosophical reflection and not through historical analysis. In other words, it is not the case that Japanese identity was pure at one point and then became contaminated after contact with Western modernity.

One of the great strengths of this volume is that, after developing his interpretation of the symposium in the introduction, Calichman lets the texts of the symposium speak for themselves so that readers may develop alternative interpretations. I would like to suggest one such alternative. As the subtitle of Calichman's translation indicates, the symposium occurred in the midst of World War II, and thus participants often argued about culture as part of a larger project to legitimize the Japanese colonial enterprise and Japan's role in the war. Calichman mentions the war but does not amply stress that, when participants developed ideologies supporting the war, they were not only concerned about identity, but they also envisioned a type of world-historical transformation. I will cite just one example from the symposium to make my point. In the final statement of the symposium, Suzuki Shigetaka's "A Note on 'Overcoming Modernity'," Suzuki makes the following comments:

[T]his issue of overcoming modernity must in a sense be seen as related to us, since European civilization has today already become deeply internalized within our country and...