The post-World War II years in the history of Modern Japan were vital in deciding the fate of the Japanese archipelago in terms of its ambitions of regaining what Emperor Hirohito of Japan in the ‘Jewel Voice Broadcast’ on 15 August 1945 called “the innateglory of the imperial state.” While there is a note of surrender in Hirohito’s speech, urging his subjects to march forward to a globalised and modern Japan by “enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable,” attempts at modernising Japan, at an incredibly rapid pace, had already begun during the Meiji period in the nineteenth century. What Hirohito’s speech critically points to is the final, official reassertion of, as well as yielding to, the temperament and paraphernalia of modernity, an issue that was vastly in contention in the first half of the twentieth century. The issue of incorporating Western modernisation within Japanese society, as the Japanese sought to construct an identity for themselves after their devastating defeat in the war, had divided the country. Japan had already gone through a period of almost two hundred years of self-isolation from the world to its West, albeit with limited trade relations with the Dutch. The Meiji government, which came to power in 1868, attempted to incorporate Western modernisation within the folds of the state of Japan and thereby fill in the gap that had been created between a ‘traditional’ Japan and an industrialised, modernised West as a result of such isolation. In the nineteenth century, the government took it upon itself to invite various scholarly and military experts from the West to boost the Japanese project of modernisation. As Dani Cavallaro writes: “grand edifices in the West’s neoclassical style were erected, its vogues were superimposed onto traditional vestimentary codes, its cuisine was incorporated into the national diet, and its artistic techniques were taught in many schools, sometimes to the disadvantage of time-honoured indigenous methods” (7-8). Such an account of how the Meiji government attempted to modernise Japan by reorienting how the average Japanese built their homes, what clothes they wore or the food they ate, and how their children were being educated in schools alert us unambiguously to the condition of the ‘everyday’ that served as a platform for such transformations. Such transformations not only established themselves by altering the ‘everyday’, but also inscribed their legitimacy and normalcy upon it. As Henri Lefebvre states in his essay “The Everyday and Everydayness:” “A condition stipulated for the legibility of forms, ordained by means of functions, inscribed within structures, the everyday constitutes the platform upon which the bureaucratic society of controlled consumerism is erected” (9).
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Sep 30, 2024
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