‘Overcoming Modernity’, Overcoming What?: ‘Modernity’ in Wartime Japan and its Implication

Abstract

Abstract The Overcoming Modernity symposium that took place in wartime Japan (in summer 1942) gained notoriety in the postwar period, as a centrepiece of wartime propaganda justifying and legitimising Japanese military actions across Asia. While the published proceedings of the symposium were not as widely read as its postwar notoriety suggests, the phrase ‘overcoming modernity’ certainly captured the zeitgeist of the time in which ‘modernity’ was questioned, debated and contested. The efforts to examine ‘modernity’ in the first half of the twentieth century in Japan were led by a group of philosophers and intellectuals often referred to as the Kyoto School of philosophy because the school mainly drew its members from the Philosophy Department of the Imperial University of Kyoto, but their efforts were not made in isolation. Questioning of modernity in the form of western civilisation had been gathering pace in the West since the end of the nineteenth century, which the members of the Kyoto School were all well aware of. This naturally leads to a few questions: What did the Kyoto School mean by ‘modernity’ in this intellectual climate? Does their ‘modernity’ justify their claim to have overcome modernity? The paper explores what the wartime Japanese intellectuals including the members of the Kyoto School understood as modernity and what they suggested as a way of overcoming it by examining two sets of symposia that took place between 1941 and 1942: the Overcoming Modernity symposium (1942) and the Chūōkōron symposia (1941–42). This examination has implications for theoretical debates on modernity, in particular, on the strengths of the multiple modernities thesis.