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 Foreword Foreword FOREWORD The first three decades of Japan’s twentieth century constituted largely unexplored terrain in English-language scholarship when Bernard S. Silberman and H. D. Harootunian invited nineteen Japanese and American scholars to Quail Roost, North Carolina, in January 1970, for the first conference on Taishò Japan. On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of papers from that trailblazing symposium (Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishò Democracy , 1974), twenty-two scholars representing a new generation of modern Japan scholarship gathered on Maui, Hawai‘i, for the second Conference on Taishò Japan. Organized by Sharon A. Minichiello and Germaine Hoston, the conference yielded this volume, representing the fruits of a collective effort to push further into the critical era preceding cataclysmic war in Asia. Although both conferences focused on the question of democracy, the Maui conference set out broader parameters that encouraged the breaking of traditional academic boundaries and intellectual paradigms. The call for papers defined topics in terms of “geographical and cultural space; cosmopolitanism and national identity; and diversity, autonomy and integration.” Accordingly, one distinguishing characteristic of the Maui conference was the presence of China, Manchuria, and Korea specialists whose research on East Asia transcended national borders. Their research not only contributed to our understanding of the nature of Japan’s imperial expansion in Asia but lent a valuable comparative dimension to the understanding of modernity in Taishò-era Japan. Modernity was happening in the colonies—in architecture, in popular culture, in technology, and in the formulation of ix national identities, though, as the papers in this volume reveal, there were multiple constructions of modernity. Exciting and unexpected linkages connecting many of the papers demonstrated mutual influences across all of Northeast Asia. The conference established the value, if not the utter necessity , of dealing with modern Japan in this larger geographical context. The exploding interest in gender studies over the past two decades contributed a second new ingredient to the Maui conference. Several participants presented research on women, studied not only as political actors and thinkers but also as symbols used to represent competing cultural values. The new look of Taishò scholarship, especially in the post–World War I period, was also disclosed in studies of popular culture, mass media, and mass consumer society, which drew on new and innovative research materials , such as photographs, cartoons, songs, radio broadcasts, and architectural drawings. A Japanese film made in the early 1920s, a group of Japanese enka singers born in that period, and a separate exhibit in the Honolulu Academy of Arts of Taishò-era paintings and decorative items further served to bring alive early twentieth-century popular culture. Finally, the Maui conference enjoyed participation by scholars from outside of the United States and Japan. Its broad call for papers resulted in invitations to participants from Canada, Australia, Denmark, and Korea. Similarities in the two conferences are also noteworthy. Although Quail Roost dwelled more on the sense of crisis and political fragmentation that seemed to characterize the Taishò era, concern with issues of nationalism and national identity and continuing efforts to comprehend the meaning of Japan’s modern experience characterized discussion at both gatherings. But above all, what holds the two conferences together in my memory of them is the excitement generated by the fellowship of dedicated academic specialists helping each other to produce scholarship of lasting significance. Gail Lee Bernstein x FOREWORD ...

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