Japanese Intellectual History Research Articles

Miura Baien and 18th Century Japanese Intellectual History: The Acceptance of Western Knowledge and the Theory of Yin-Yang and Wuxing

Abstract This paper will focus on Miura Baien (1723–1789) to have a glimpse of how Edo intellectuals viewed Western and traditional Chinese knowledge, and how they thought about the world and nature in the middle of Tokugawa period. Miura is a thinker who has created an exquisite system that is almost unmatched by others in Japanese intellectual history. Maeno was a Japanese physician and pioneer of Dutch learning. Both of them deny the view of nature and the body based on the theory of Yin-Yang and Wuxing, and accepted the intellectual shock brought about by Dutch learning. Therefore, I will use the views of these two Edo scholars to discuss the criticism and application of the theory of Yin-Yang and Wuxing in Edo Japan, and their understanding of Western knowledge. Furthermore, I will also compare Miura Baien with Dai Zhen (1724–1777), a Chinese thinker who was born around the same period, to argue that Western learning in Qing China, and the theory of Yin-Yang and Wuxing were how to be used. By doing so, this paper would like to illustrate the unique thoughts of Miura Baien and characteristics of 18th century Japanese intellectual history.

From Native To Continental: Religious Landscape In Early Medieval Japan

Japan is perceived to be a “unique” country not only by the general public but also by academics. Therefore, for a long time the idea that every aspect of Japanese history was unique setting it apart from its continental neighbors prevailed. History of religion and intellectual currents in Japan are no exception to this point of view. While Shinto is considered to be native to Japan, Buddhism, Confucianism and other intellectual and religious currents entered Japan via Korea and Japan, and they influenced shinto as much as they influenced the intellectual history of Japan. In this respect, while Japan retains some of the characteristics unique to it just as any country has its unique characteristics, Japan was closely linked to its continental neighbors intellectually and religiously despite its geographic isolation as an island. In this regard, putting the early medieval Japanese intellectual history within a geographically broader East Asian perspective in connection with Korea and China is essential to better comprehend both the similar and unique developments of Japanese intellectual history vis-à-vis its continental neighbors.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Towards a New Universality: Mizoguchi Yūzō and Postwar Japanese Intellectual History Sixiangshi zhong de riben yu zhongguo [Japan and China in the Midst of Intellectual History], written by Sun Ge (2017)

Towards a New Universality: Mizoguchi Yūzō and Postwar Japanese Intellectual History Sixiangshi zhong de riben yu zhongguo [Japan and China in the Midst of Intellectual History], written by Sun Ge (2017)

A Study on the Birth, Development of the Studies of Japanese Intellectual History -Focusing on Japanese Researches on the Japanese Intellectual History-

A Study on the Birth, Development of the Studies of Japanese Intellectual History -Focusing on Japanese Researches on the Japanese Intellectual History-

일본사상사학의 탄생과 발전에 대한 시론 - 일본의 일본사상사 연구를 중심으로 -

일본사상사학의 탄생과 발전에 대한 시론 - 일본의 일본사상사 연구를 중심으로 -

Resurrection of a Premodern Hero

This article examines a significant intellectual controversy that occurred in the 1920s over the life and death of Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159–89), a Japanese legendary warrior from the twelfth century, and its cultural and political significance during the next two decades. In so doing, it illuminates the importance of Yoshitsune, a major figure and a hero of Japan’s premodern era, in the formation of wartime Japanese intellectual history. A key player in these debates was Oyabe Zen’ichirō (1867–1941), an amateur anthropologist and educator of the Ainu, Japan’s indigenous population, who revived the Yoshitsune legends. The enduring popularity of the legends was aided by the numerous cultural adaptations of the legends produced during the 1930s and 1940s. Writers, historians, and artists shifted away from the consistently debated dualism of historical truth that divided scientific and mythic reasoning and found a new meaning of the myths in Japanese intellectual history.

Association of Japanese Intellectual History Public Symposium

Association of Japanese Intellectual History Public Symposium

Fukuzawa Yukichi and Maruyama Masao: Two “Liberal” readings of Tocqueville in Japan

Unlike in China and Korea, Tocqueville and his works have been known in Japan for more than a century. Of course he has not had such a wide and lasting influence on Japanese intellectual life as Karl Marx or Max Weber. And his popularity as a classical thinker never attained such national fame in this country as in the United States and France. His intellectual influence has not spread over a great many people of the country. But several key figures of Japanese intellectual history sharply reacted to certain Tocquevi.llian ideas. In the fairly long history of Japanese reading of Tocqueville, I would like to concentrate on two significant periods, the early Meiji era and the post-war period, and choose two key figures to focus on, Fukuzawa Yuki.chi and Maruyama Masao, who at each period played a leading role in Japanese intellectual life.

The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano (review)

Reviewed by: The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano Kiri Paramore (bio) The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan. By Katsuya Hirano. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013. vii, 295 pages. $75.00, cloth; $25.00, paper; $25.00, E-book. The interaction between cultural production and politics is one of the most fascinating topics in early modern Japanese history. One of the things that make it so fascinating is the lack of consensus on the basic contours of this relationship. Was the Tokugawa state obsessed with controlling and repressing cultural expression, as a literal surface reading of some of its edicts might suggest? Or was cultural production comparatively unfettered and free, as the volume and social penetration of cultural production might suggest? The uncertain truth lies somewhere in between. Trying to get at it opens up more questions. Was there a political edge to culture at all? Was the Tokugawa state even capable of using coercive force in the cultural sphere over sustained periods? Is a state versus nonstate paradigm (the dominant paradigm in contemporary American analyses) at all relevant to the way Tokugawa artists and politicians thought about the nature of politics and discourse? I certainly don’t have any definite answer to these questions. But they are fascinating to discuss and good for stimulating debate across the Japan studies field—equally of interest to specialists in literature, history, art, religion, and politics. The book under review does not ask any of these questions. Instead, it uncritically accepts an old-fashioned assumption that the Tokugawa state and Confucian intellectuals were repressive and sought to strangle cultural expression, especially expression related to human emotion, irrationality, and sensual physicality (pp. 2, 7). The book at times focuses on “the body—its desire and excesses” (p. 4) as the primary object of the state’s repression. But at other times the focus is expanded to “the structure of feeling” (p. 27), a phrase author Katsuya Hirano attributes to the New Left scholar Raymond Williams (1921–88), but which I in this context associated with a different figure, neither new nor left: Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), and specifically his idea of nasake. The idea that Neo-Confucianism in Japan, and possibly by allusion or association also the Tokugawa state, sought to suppress expression or “feeling” was first introduced by late Tokugawa National Learning scholars such as Norinaga in their criticism of Confucianism. After the Meiji supplantation of the Tokugawa order (and as part of the imperial state’s diminishment of Confucianism and elevation of National Learning), this idea [End Page 234] became a trope of modern nationalist historiography. It became a core element in the historical narrative that equated the Tokugawa past with backward Sinitic despotism and the glory of modern Japan with a freer, emotive, and thus simultaneously romantic and rational nationalist spirit. In other words, the ideas underlying this assumption have a very dark and dense history, one clearly associated with anti-Chineseness and ultimately with the early twentieth-century ideas of modern Japanese cultural supremacy which anti-Chineseness fed. This historical outlook was also adopted by non-Japanese-language historians (based mainly in Europe and the Anglophone world) just as readily as they accepted most of the rest of Meiji historiography. After all, many of the contours of Meiji historiography, particularly its inherent anti-Chineseness, were constructed in part to conform and appeal to the particular prejudices emergent in nineteenth-century European thought. The uncritical acceptance of this historical outlook means Hirano’s book is based on an assumption never argued, and which in the blanket terms it is asserted would (I guess) not be accepted by most professional historians of this period. But need that matter? After all, the most influential book in Japanese intellectual history, Maruyama Masao’s Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton University Press, 1974), was also based on a huge assumption that today no one accepts: the idea that Song Neo-Confucianism functioned as an orthodox state ideology throughout the Tokugawa regime. Maruyama later admitted he was wrong, even as the book was reprinted and retranslated...

Book review: Ontology of Production: Three Essays, written by Nishida Kitarō

This is a review-essay on William Haver’s recent translation of three essays by Nishida Kitarō in a volume entitledOntologies of Production. Nishida is one of the founders of the famous Kyoto School of philosophy and, while his philosophy is not really Marxist, Haver attempts to bring Nishida into dialogue with Marx in his Introduction and through his selection of essays to translate. I attempt to situate Haver’s translation in a brief discussion of a recent debate on how to write modern Japanese intellectual history and, through this examination, I suggest a framework for analysing modern intellectual history drawing on the work of Harry Harootunian, Moishe Postone and Jacques Bidet. In short, this framework attempts to relate the production of ideas to the temporal dynamic associated with capital, the commodity-form and other related mediations that make up the modern global capitalist system. Then I turn to Haver’s Introduction and translations and both explain some of the key concepts of Nishida and show how, using the framework that I outlined, Nishida’s work can be conceived of as failing to understand its own conditions of possibility in the multiple mediations of capitalism. For this reason, Nishida’s work, like many other romantic critiques of capitalism, criticises the abstractions of modernity at an abstract level, failing to account for the mediations of capitalism such as class and the commodity.

Japanese Postmodern Philosophy’s Turn to Historicity

In this paper, I will outline and categorize the history of postmodernism in the Japanese context. I will also critically analyze its changes from the perspective of postwar Japanese intellectual history as well as the postwar history of Japanese political philosophy. I will position this new intellectual and philosophical tendency, which has been around for nearly forty years since the late 1970s, in a global context, and I will especially position it within an East Asian perspective, which from my point of view, has been neglected. It also means that I will not only see Japanese postmodernism as the outcome of imported theory, rather, I will attempt to see it in its own historical context. And by outlining the shift of Japanese postmodernism over these forty years, I will also attempt to see the differences and continuities between Japanese modernism and postmodernism, thus attempting to overcome the opposing dichotomy of “modernism versus postmodernism” in the postwar Japanese intellectual context. As my conclusion, I regard the shifts in the history of postmodern philosophy over the past forty years, as a process of its turn to achieve historicity, and I also see it as a kind of localization of new Western thoughts in a modern Japanese context.

A method of Japanese intellectual history and the issue of Norinaga

A method of Japanese intellectual history and the issue of Norinaga

Walter A. Skya . Japan's Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shintō Ultranationalism . (Asia‐Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society.) Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press . 2009 . Pp. xii, 387. Cloth $94.95, paper $25.95.

I remember well the graduate school seminar where we debated the question of whether people in prewar and wartime Japan believed the emperor was divine. The class consensus was no, that the Tenno's status was special but somewhere below what people in the West perceive as godlike. I lost the debate. Now comes a new work in Japanese intellectual history by Walter A. Skya which asserts that not only did the Japanese mainstream at the time worship the emperor as the actual blood descendent of the Sun Goddess, but that this belief and its associated “radical Shinto ultranationalism” were substantial components of the ideology that underlay Japanese violent politics, international expansionism, and soldier and civilian behavior in war. This system was militant and totalitarian, and during the Taisho era it displaced the conservative familial statism of the Meiji period. Moreover, Shinto fundamentalism was undergirded by the work of well-placed scholars and promoted by influential activist organizations. Skya's work, while not without its warts, rightly challenges presumptions in modern Japanese history about the role of religion in the Japanese national self-concept, the place of the emperor and notions of national polity (kokutai) in the Japanese body politic, and the nature of Japanese fascism.

Explanations of the Earth's features and origin in pre-Meiji Japan

AbstractPre-Meiji Japan was a religiously rich and intellectually varied country, where a large number of theories and beliefs about the origin of the Earth and its features coexisted. The history of science, and the history of geology in particular, lacks an account of this fertile and stimulating socio-cultural system and intellectual environment. The present paper aims to contribute to its understanding, by providing an overview of the most influential religious and scholarly approaches to geological topics in Japan from the eighth century to 1868. The comparison of explanations and beliefs on subjects such as fossils, volcanic eruptions, mountains and the origin of the Earth, and the analysis of geological expertise confirm the heterodox and holistic tendency of the Japanese intellectual and religious environment, which has had positive and negative outcomes for scientific thinking. It also reveals the importance of power structures, and of the social division of labour and knowledge, in the shaping of the Japanese intellectual and religious history.

Early Japanese Christian Thought Reexamined: Confucian Ethics, Catholic Authority, and the Issue of Faith in the Scholastic Theories of Habian, Gomez, and Ricci

Many late sixteenth/early seventeenth century Japanese Christian texts worked directly within arguments that could be found concurrently in Confucian, syncretist, and other traditions in at this time. Japanese Christian has often been characterized as an example of non-Japanese other, or as playing a primary role of importing Western thought during this period. This article argues, on contrary, that importance of many of major currents of Japanese Christian actually lies precisely in way they interacted with and within arguments which were not particular to, Christian tradition. KEYWORDS: Habian/Fabian - Myotei mondo - Hadaius - Early-modern - Tokugawa rule - Confucianism - Christianity - Scholasticism - Matteo Ricci - Tianzhu Shiyi (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) I also saw [Jesuit] text Myotei mondo by Fukan [Habian]... It discusses Buddhism (the ten sects as well as Ikko and Nichiren, so twelve sects), Confucianism and Shinto. It is not worth looking at. It is all verbose ranting strung together in vulgar Japanese. Hayashi Razan, Secretary to Tokugawa Shogunate and Anti-Christian Polemicist (1606 or 1650s) (HRB, 673)1 The extent of Habian's understanding of Christianity [as seen in Myotei mondo] ends with concept of a sentient creator God. His shallowness of faith meant that he was not able to grasp core doctrine of salvation through crucifixion. I think this was determining reason that he became an apostate. Ebisawa Arimichi, Christian historian (1991) (KKRS EA, 512) Habian ... (1565-1621), also known as Fabian, Fukansai Habian ..., Hapian ..., Habiyan ..., and Fukan ..., was a prominent apologist, public speaker, and author of famous Japanese text Myotei mondo ... Through these activities he came to be identified as most influential of all Japanese Christian thinkers of so-called first period of Christianity in of late sixteenth/early seventeenth centuries.2 As most competent Japanese rhetoricist of his time, Habian was dispatched in 1603 to Jesuit Temple in Japanese capital, Kyoto. While in this prime position in Kyoto Habian not only authored Myotei mondo, but moreover became widely known in city as a charismatic orator and representative of Jesuits in debates against notable Buddhist and Confucian figures. By 1608, however, Habian seems to have left Jesuits. Notably, this was before active persecution of Christians by Tokugawa shogunate began in 1613-1614. By 1620, seven years into active suppression of Christians by Tokugawa government, Habian was back in Nagasaki, but seemingly not on Christian side. He is ascribed as having participated in suppression of Christianity, most notably through his authorship of Hadaius, a text which went on to become most famous anti-Christian text of this period.3 After Habian's death, this dramatic story of his life, in particular his so-called apostasy, appeared as a theme in a range of different literary works.4 Thenceforth, Habian's and post-Jesuit period ideas, together with story of his life, came to be presented through a virile anti-Christian discourse as an example of intellectual and political clash between Japan and the West. In other words, his ideas and actions came to be understood in terms of an imagined conflict constructed between images of Japaneseness and non-Japaneseness.5 Interestingly, this same framework, constructed by anti-Christian polemicists in Tokugawa period, has also been one through which most historians of twentieth century have analyzed not just Habian's works, but indeed Japanese Christian of this period in general. In nearly all of twentieth-century research on this period, although Japanese Christian writing like Habian's period work Myotei mondo has been highly valued as a source of Japanese intellectual history, that value has been discussed in terms of its role in challenging traditional Japanese thought by introducing Western thought to (Ebisawsa 1964, 117-18; Ide 1995, 258-59). …

Thinking Like a Man: Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825) (review)

Reviewed by: Thinking Like a Man: Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825) Marcia Yonemoto Thinking Like a Man: Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825). By Bettina Gramlich-Oka. Leiden: Brill, 2006. 319 pages. Hardcover €89.00/$116.00. In the first full-length study in a Western language of the writer Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825), Bettina Gramlich-Oka offers a valuable analysis of an eclectic and original thinker who was also a woman, a daughter, and a wife. In doing so, she illuminates the challenges facing Tokugawa intellectuals who, while steeped in Confucian ideals and conforming to them in fundamental ways, were also extremely critical of the political and social world in which they lived. Gramlich-Oka seeks to examine Makuzu first and foremost as a thinker and attempts to link her ideas and texts to major intellectual currents and movements of the time. At the same time she foregrounds issues of gender, for it was Makuzu's status as a woman, Gramlich-Oka argues, that both circumscribed and enabled her extraordinary literary production. In the introduction, Gramlich-Oka situates Makuzu's work in the two major genres and analytical categories in which it has generally been placed: "Japanese literature" [End Page 363] and "Japanese intellectual history." In the first instance, Gramlich-Oka shows that although Makuzu was an accomplished writer of wabun, placing her writings in the category of joryū bungaku, or "women's literature," as has often been done, is inadequate and inappropriate, for Makuzu also wrote essentially political treatises such as Hitori kangae (Solitary Thoughts, 1817-1818), in which she criticizes everything from Confucian notions of human relations to bakufu monetary policy. In the confines of mainstream Japanese intellectual history, Makuzu has fared no better. Although she was a student of Kokugaku, she did not espouse any single intellectual orthodoxy. Rather, her writings reflect a wide range of ideas and influences, culled from her studies of Kokugaku, Rangaku, and the mercantilist theories of thinkers like Kaiho Seiryō (1755-1817). While Makuzu's eclecticism links her to various schools of thought, she was for the most part barred from direct participation in academic debate by virtue of her gender, her family circumstances, and her residence in the far northeast, in Sendai. And yet, as Gramlich-Oka points out, although she was widowed and isolated after the death of her parents, husband, and many of her siblings, Makuzu transformed her place on the geographic, academic, and social margins into a unique vantage point from which to observe and critique the world as she saw it. Because Makuzu's texts are so intimately linked to events in her life, Gramlich-Oka devotes the first half of Thinking Like A Man to discussing Makuzu's biography and its relationship to her thought and writing. In chapter 1 she shows how the figure of Makuzu's father, Kudō Heisuke (1734-1800), a physician and scholar in the service of the Date house of Sendai who was posted in Edo, dominated her personal and intellectual universe. Heisuke's intellectual interests were wide-ranging, and he consorted with some of the brightest and most open minds of his day, from high-ranking officials to eminent Rangaku scholars. He also counted among his close friends famous kabuki actors and female courtesans and performers. Today Heisuke is best known as an expert on Russian affairs and an advocate of engaging in trade relations with the Russians in Ezo, ideas he put forth in Akaezu fūsetsu kō, a work submitted to the shogunal government in 1783 that earned the support of the then senior councillor (rōjū) Tanuma Okitsugu (1719-1788). Until Tanuma's fall from power in the mid-1780s, the future seemed bright for the Kudō family, and it is no wonder that Makuzu spent much of her adult life longing for the vibrant world of her youth, when her father was in his prime and the household thriving. In chapter 2, Gramlich-Oka shows that Heisuke's legacy to Makuzu was built on the strong foundation of formal and informal education he offered his oldest daughter and, perhaps more importantly, the example of wide-ranging curiosity and intellectual ambition he himself provided. As her principal teacher and...

Civilization and Its Contents (review)

Reviewed by: Civilization and Its Contents Cemil Aydin Civilization and Its Contents. By Bruce Mazlish. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. 188 pp. $48.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Written by a prominent public intellectual and historian of globalization, Civilization and Its Contents offers thought-provoking insights in a collection of seven well-integrated essays on the politics and historical trajectory of the concept of civilization. Today, scholars all agree that the notion of civilization, like its associated concepts, such as nation, culture, and cosmopolitanism, is a social construct. Bruce Mazlish invites us to rethink how the political and ideological nature of this construct changed over time in order to underline a bold suggestion that the notion of civilization should itself retire from scholarly inquiry, not to disappear entirely from the literature perhaps, but to be replaced by better conceptual tools to help us understand the reality of global humanity and its local variations. Mazlish approaches the topic with a historicizing agenda, taking us on a tour of the origin and later evolution of the concept of civilization, starting from the reification of the civilized (city life)—barbarian (nomadic) distinction. This binary opposition was transformed by eighteenth-century European Enlightenment thinkers to universalize Eurocentric values during the early modern era of globalization. In the second chapter, Mazlish underlines how the early eighteenth-century comparative and relativist observations of proud Europeans about the virtues of their own civilization in relation to those of other civilizations were replaced in the nineteenth century by more rigid and arrogant discourses on European superiority, paralleling the transition from a benign colonial ideology to the era of more savage colonialism. Chapter 3 offers one of the best intellectual history accounts about the tensions during the nineteenth century between an inclusive definition [End Page 451] of European civilization and more exclusive, race-based definitions, with important arguments about the triumph of the latter. Examining the writings of François Guizot, Arthur de Gobineau, Charles Darwin, and Henry Thomas Buckle, European writers who had global intellectual impact, Mazlish outlines the lineage and politics behind the key themes of European civilization, such as religion, morality, race, climate, and evolution, presenting a clear picture of the sharpening of European/white/Western supremacism even though the universalist inclinations of the idea of civilization initially included the possibility of others becoming a member of, or adopting, European civilization. It is important to add, from the research of the present reviewer on Ottoman and Japanese intellectual history, that the works of the European intellectuals that Mazlish analyzed were very closely read by non-European intellectuals. It was the irony of nineteenth-century globalization that European intellectuals were defining a noninclusive notion of European civilization precisely when Asian intellectuals were interested in the universal aspects of this civilization and claimed that religion, race, or climate should not and would not be an obstacle for the appropriation of the universal aspects of European civilization. In the fourth chapter, "Civilizing Process," Mazlish discusses, again with great erudition, European intellectuals, such as Freud and Norbert Elias, who formulated ideas about the dark sides of European civilization and stayed away from the triumphal tone of the earlier celebratory accounts. From a global history perspective, this chapter should have covered another group of critics of European civilization, romantics, especially those Stephan Hay described as Asiaphile romantics (which includes not only Theosophists but also advocates of Oriental renaissance), who left a great impact on the changing notions of civilization in Asia. Hence, the fifth chapter, which is about the Egyptian, Chinese, and Thai perspectives on the concept of civilization, could have been enriched by including the extraordinary transformation of the discourse of civilization from an ideology of savage colonialism into an intellectual instrument of anticolonial nationalism, especially through the discourse of spiritual, moral East versus materialist, decadent West. The last two chapters of the book include timely scholarly observations on the recent attempts at dialogue among civilizations, intensified in recent years, with United Nations and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) backing. Demonstrating his wisdom as a global historian, Bruce Mazlish illustrates why current clashes are within civilizations, but never between different civilizations. Even though the well-intentioned...

日本の公共・市民とその学術

日本の公共・市民とその学術

Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics (review)

Reviewed by: Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics Michael K. Bourdaghs (bio) Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics. By Yumiko Iida. Routledge, London, 2002. viii, 328 pages. $129.95. Any book that attempts, as does the present volume, to capture the entirety of twentieth-century Japanese intellectual discourse within a single analytical framework must—almost by definition—fail in its task. The important question then becomes, what kind of failure does it achieve? Is it an interesting one? Is it useful? Yumiko Iida's Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics measures up quite well in those respects: it is one of the most interesting and useful books on Japanese intellectual history published in recent years. The book surveys modern Japanese attempts to define a national identity, ranging from the "cultural renaissance" of the 1930s to the more recent historical revisionism of figures such as Katō Norihiro and Fukuda Kazuya. Its chapters are arranged chronologically, organized largely by decades. Each provides a narrative of economic, political, and cultural developments from the period in question and then moves on to analyze the thought of key intellectuals whose works were central to that moment. This sustained effort to historicize intellectual currents allows Iida to map out subtle but important shifts in the form and function of nationalism in Japan across the course of the twentieth century. This narrative framework, along with the succinct summaries provided for various intellectual positions, would make the volume a fine textbook for courses in modern Japanese thought—except that the price of the current edition almost certainly prohibits classroom use. The book provides intelligent discussions of a number of postwar Japanese intellectuals whose writings are too often neglected in English-language scholarship, including Yoshimoto Takaaki, Takeuchi Yoshimi, and Etō Jun. In other cases, Iida takes up schools of thought that have been explored in more detail elsewhere. Her discussion of the 1930s, for example, focuses largely on the "overcoming modernity" debates and the Japan Romantic School, which are discussed extensively in Harry Harootunian's Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Kevin Doak's Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (University of California Press, 1994). Likewise, her discussion of early postwar liberalism covers terrain explored in greater detail in J. Victor Koschmann's Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Even in these cases, though, Iida does not simply replicate the earlier scholarship. Given the nature of her ambitious argument here, she cannot [End Page 232] explore the individual thinkers in the depth that full monographs devoted to each could provide. The primary contribution of the present volume lies in the way it ties various strands of twentieth-century intellectual discourse into a single, coherent argument. This is the source of both the book's considerable interest as well as its occasional excesses. Iida argues that Japanese nationalism is best understood as a kind of hegemony (in Antonio Gramsci's sense of the word) that has achieved reproduction primarily by way of the aesthetic. This is because "the aesthetic is the domain where the unspeakable stories of the excluded are given voice as a protest against the transformative forces in the modern configuration of thought and social order" (p.3). The aesthetic functions ideologically by promising to restore harmony to the various contradictions and polarities that haunt modern thought, such as subject/object, universal/particular, and logos/pathos. "Thus remedies for the ill effects of the modern were formulated in aesthetic terms... not only as a response to the alleged limitations of modern rationality, but also because the aesthetic was the realm in which the essence of Japanese culture was thought to lie" (p.60). Iida's approach to nationalism via aesthetics allows her to critique it effectively without simply rejecting it as an aberration. She demonstrates, for example, how the romantic nationalisms of the 1930s, the 1960s, and the 1990s all can be understood as attempts to counter the alienation that capitalist development brought to twentieth-century Japan. Despite attempts by cultural nationalists to define a national space that transcends modernity, Iida shows...