Nation as artwork: the modernist aesthetics and poetics of Hagiwara Sakutaro˘

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This article explores responses to modernity and the challenge it poses to identity in Japan through the works of the poet Hagiwara Sakutaro˘. It concludes by arguing that, inspired by Sakutaro˘'s call to ‘return to Japan’, the Japanese Romantics transformed Japan into a spiritual project of overcoming the modern and the West – thus being superior – through the nostalgic construction of a cultural essence.