Civilizational Aspects of Japanese History: Continuities and Discontinuities

Jóhann Páll Árnason

doi:10.14712/23363525.2021.20

Abstract

This paper discusses the merits and problems of civilizational perspectives on Japanese history, with particular reference to the task of combining a comparative approach with valid points made by those who see Japan as a highly self-contained cultural world. After a brief consideration of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s reflections on Japan, the central section of the paper deals with Shmuel Eisenstadt’s work. His conception of Japan as a distinctive civilization characterized by pre-axial patterns is rejected on the grounds that the native mode of thought which he proposes to describe is more plausibly interpreted as an offshoot of Chinese traditions, although a notably autonomous and historically changing one. The transmission of Daoism to Japan, although much less explicit than the reception of Confucianism and Buddhism, was of crucial importance. That said, Eisenstadt’s concrete analyses of Japanese ways to transform foreign inputs are often detailed and insightful, and his comments on the relationship between culture and institutions raise important questions, although they must in many cases be reformulated in more historical terms. The paper discusses the genesis, dynamics and collapse of the Tokugawa regime (1600–1868), and concludes with reflections on Japanese modernity, up to and including its present crisis.

Highlights

This paper discusses the merits and problems of civilizational perspectives on Japanese history, with particular reference to the task of combining a comparative approach with valid points made by those who see Japan as a highly self-contained cultural world
As a major authority on twentieth-century Japanese history puts it, “something about Japan invites people to view it hermetically”, and the same author adds that “it is not just outsiders who tend to isolate and insulate the Japanese experience; no one makes more of a fetish of the supposed singularity of the national character and the national experience than the country’s own cultural essentialists and neonationalists” [Dower 1999: 29]
As the title suggests, trying to bring together two very different aspects of the Western encounter with Japan: the aesthetic fascination that had been such a key element in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century perceptions of Japan, and the subsequent experience of Japanese militarism. She drew on the record of cultural anthropology and on Oswald Spengler’s morphology of culture; the combination of these sources enabled her to portray Japan as a self-contained cultural world, while avoiding Spengler’s restrictive classification of high cultures and his excessive emphasis on one primal symbol for each of them (Spengler dismissed the very idea of Japanese culture in a footnote, suggesting that the culture of Japan had been Chinese and was Western)