Book Review: Heritage on stage: the invention of ethnic place in America’s Little Switzerland

Abstract

ent form by a number of leading Marxists, and addressed by Andrew Barshay’s chapter in this volume. Many of the contributors to this book reflect on the manipulation of traditions in terms of binaries of space and time, binaries that are singled out and defined as essential elements of modernity. As Jennifer Robertson notes, in a chapter entitled ‘It takes a village: internationalization and nostalgia in postwar Japan’, the concentration of activity in Tokyo has led to an exoticization of the countryside. In this state-sanctioned space of nostalgia, arenas for the performance of traditional activities are created, despite the inevitable paradox in this process (a paradox inherent within modernity). Modernity defines itself in terms of tradition, but tradition is always at its root a view of the past defined and informed by the present and heavily imbued therefore with nostalgia. Carol Gluck, whose book Japan’s modern myths: ideology in the late Meiji period (Princeton University Press, 1985) is one of the inspirations for this work, details the highly selective rendition of Edo (the name for premodern Tokyo) that came to be used as a basis for extolling a postmodern, nativist view of the contemporary city. Bluck’s is but one of several chapters that can be read as a critique not only of the more explicitly state-oriented exercises in tradition manipulation of the prewar period but also of the rather more obliquely ideological orientations of postwar historiography. For in the end, the writing of history is an ideologically laden enterprise and one in which traditions are constantly being reinforced, recast, or re-evaluated. Mirror of modernity is the work of a number of leading American scholars, most of them historians, and three Japanese sociologists. Its strong engagement with theory – Foucault is inevitably a central point of reference – marks it out as an important staging post in a more theoretically informed understanding of Japan. It is therefore a book with resonances that reach beyond the exclusive domain of Japanese studies. On its way, it enriches our understanding of the multiplicity of meanings that modernity can have. It challenges our epistemologies of modernity, but equally it challenges the assumptions that lie behind Japanese exceptionalism.