Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (review)

We take for granted that modernity is "the antithesis of nature in its celebration of a denatured, liberated subjectivity and its technological control of the physical environment" (p. ix). In this thought-provoking volume, Julia Adeney Thomas investigates the ways in which political theorists deployed concepts of nature in Japan from the nineteenth century through the 1930s, the period during which Japan transformed itself from an isolated agrarian society to an industrializing imperial power. Despite tremendous societal changes associated with modernization, one could argue that Japan remained antimodern, considering the Japanese love of nature and limited individualism. Because of this intriguing paradox, Thomas's reevaluation of nature in relation to modernity and her search for Japan's place in modernity are particularly significant.

Thomas examines writings of Tokugawa neo-Confucianists, nativists, Meiji intellectuals, and wartime propagandists, among others. References to nature in these documents reveal that Japanese political visions of nature evolved from the spatial and hierarchical concept of the Tokugawa era, through temporal and social Darwinism with its emphasis on survival in the late nineteenth century, to an ultranationalistic concept based on an ideology of an organic family state in the 1930s. This finding, put together with a wide range of theoretical literature—old and new, Japanese and Western—on modernity, has led Thomas to reject the presumption that nature is an unchanging, universal, and monolithic phenomenon and that modernity can only exist after human conquest of nature.

Partly inspired by the philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin, Thomas suggests an alternative way to conceptualize modernity: "not [as] an achieved state but a historical experience" and "the conscious reconfiguration of the cosmos [nature]" (pp. 27, 29). This new cosmological interpretation of modernity allows her to transcend the limitations of existing scholarship. Based on the linear historical view, Japanese modernization theorists and Marxist historians have heretofore seen European liberal-democratic modernity as the ultimate goal. They have postulated that the Japanese variety of ultranational modernity in harmony with nature is a distorted form of ideal modernity. Some scholars explain Japan's different trajectory with cultural exceptionalism. In contrast, Thomas contends that liberal modernity in Europe (and North America) and autocratic modernity in Japan are both varieties of true modernity. This new vision, which deuniversalizes European modernity, no longer warrants the hierarchical divide between the modern West and the pseudomodern East. Thomas thus challenges mainstream narratives both in Japanese history and world history.

Her discussions, however, leave some room for further exploration. One is related to the term tenno¯ (emperor) and the term ten (heaven or nature). Thomas notes that the Meiji ideologue Kato¯ Hiroyuki considered the emperor not divine but human, and distinguished secular nature (shizen) from divine nature (ten). Yet she shows that Kato¯ continued to use the term tenno¯, implying divinity with the character ten, in his Kokutai shinron (1874). This is interesting, since, until the 1890 Meiji Constitution standardized tenno¯ as the preferred term for the emperor to other expressions, such as mikado, ue, kami, shujo¯, and ko¯tei, tenno¯ was by no means an obvious choice. Thomas also maintains that the Meiji Constitution "hardly mention[s] nature in any form" (p. 158), discounting its reference to tenno¯. Why was the term tenno¯ adopted in 1890? Did the concept of nature in the tenno¯ discourse change? How does it figure in the cosmological transformation of the relationship between nature and modernity? Given the political centrality of the tenno¯ institution during the period covered by Thomas's study, elaboration of this issue would have benefited readers.

Such questions aside, this book is a remarkable synthesis of history and theory, empiricism and comparativism. Its thesis will break important new ground for scholars working on non-Western science and technology, who face sometimes counterproductive binaries such as East/West, center/periphery, and traditional/modern.