Abstract
The symposium on overcoming modernity (kindai no chōkoku) that took place in Tokyo in 1942 has been much commented upon, but later critics have tended to over-emphasize the wartime political context and the ideological connection to Japanese ultra-nationalism. Closer examination shows that the background and the actual content of the discussion were more complicated. The idea of overcoming modernity had already appeared in debates among Japanese intellectuals before the war, and was always open to different interpretations; it could indicate Japanese ambitions to move beyond Western paradigms of modernity, but in other cases it referred to more radical visions of alternatives to modernity as such. Some versions linked up with Western critiques of existing modernity, including traditionalist as well as more future-oriented ones. These differentiations are evident in the symposium, and associated with diverse schools of thought. An important input came from representatives of the Kyoto school, the most distinctive current in twentieth-century Japanese philosophy. Despite the suppression of Marxist thought, the background influence of the unorthodox Marxist thinker Miki Kiyoshi was significant. Another major contribution came from the group known as the Japan Romantic School, active in literature and literary criticism. Other intellectuals of widely varying persuasions, from outspoken nationalists to Catholic theologians, also participated. The result was a rich but also thoroughly inconclusive discussion, from which no consensus on roads beyond modernity could emerge.
Highlights
To mid-nineteenth century was a period when a significant number of intellectuals were proclaiming the end of modernity
In Europe there were those like Oswald Spengler who wrote of the “decline of the West” and René Guénon who attacked Western modernity on behalf of Oriental tradition [Spengler 1961; Guénon 1996]
Two intellectual currents represented in the “Overcoming Modernity” symposium were the Kyoto School (京都学派) of philosophy and the Japan Romantic School (日本 浪漫派) in literature and literary criticism
Summary
To mid-nineteenth century was a period when a significant number of intellectuals were proclaiming the end of modernity. In its path to modernize and resist colonialism, Japan had to adopt the same colonialist policies of the West, beginning with the acquisition of Taiwan in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), to the acquisitions of the southern half of the Sakhalin Island and control and eventual annexation of Korea from the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), increasing influence over China, the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932, and its attempt to gain control throughout China with the China Incident of 1937.3 After the war, Takeuchi Yoshimi (竹内好) (1910–1977) expressed this contradiction in his essay “Overcoming Modernity”「( 近代の超克」) through a series of oppositional relations, e.g., restoration and renovation, royalty and exclusion, national isolationism and opening the country, ultranationalism and “civilization and enlightenment”, East and West, and so on [Kawakami – Takeuchi 1979: 338; Takeuchi 2005a: 146]. They did not take part in the symposium their influence cannot be ignored
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