Whose renaissance? Changing paradigms of rebirth in interwar and wartime Japan

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe aim of the present article is to analyse how Japanese interwar and wartime intellectuals symbolized and interpreted the historically complex relationship between the Renaissance and Humanism and linked it to their social and political predicament. Spanning from Taishō era’s father of proletarian literature Katagami Noburu to Ōe Kenzaburō’s mentor Watanabe Kazuo, through philosophers such as Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun and writers such as Kobayashi Hideo and Yasuda Yojūrō, this article reconstructs the public debate concerning national renaissance and the universality of the human being. Besides more classic forms of scholarly publication such as essays and erudite books, the analysis relies on articles in newspapers and public symposia, in order to highlight the public dimension of the discourse on renaissance and humanism and the influence that political change in Shōwa Japan exerted upon it. We will see how the intellectual struggle for the human being disappeared from the newspapers with war propaganda increasingly appropriating the term ‘Renaissance,’ and how humanism became an underground tool of cultural resistance, ready to re-emerge after war defeat.