Book Review: Mirror of modernity: invented traditions of modern Japan

Abstract

Japan, we are often told, was the first non-Western country to enter the hallowed time/space of modernity. There is therefore a sort of paradigmatic power to Japan’s transition from a state of premodern Innocence to one of modern Experience. The apparently abrupt and radical nature of the change has not been lost on the Japanese themselves, who have devoted much thought to the particularities of their trajectory. Within a few years in the 1860s and 1870s, the emperor, an obscure and impoverished figurehead, had been catapulted into the position of a sacred national symbol, and through the adept construction of unifying institutions a small number of leading politicians were able to forge a consciousness of a nation-state called Japan and of its inhabitants as subjectcitizens. In doing so, they were remorselessly inventive and imaginative in their creation of new traditions. Mirror of modernity concerns itself less, however, with this early period of centrally scripted history than with a later stage of appropriation and manipulation of tradition. The defining scheme of the book is that of ‘invented tradition’. The reference to Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The invention of tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983) is explicit. But the earlier work is left far behind, stranded by the high tide of its naïve historicism, while the present volume immerses itself comfortably and productively in the warm currents of social theory. ‘Traditions’, Stephen Vlastos reminds us in his introduction, ‘are shaped by everything from capitalist markets to technological innovation in the ongoing process of incorporating and reorganizing new knowledge’ (p. 6). Traditions – supremely ideological as they are – stand caught in a ‘disjuncture between the rhetorical posture of invariance . . . and their actual historicity’ (p. 7). Traditions spring from attempts to give meaning to modern life through a carefully scripted rendition of a status quo ante. In this sense, they are perhaps not so much invented as crafted or moulded. Running through the contributions to this book is an insistence on the overwhelming significance of state and capital, but above all of state. The state in modern Japan is characterized as inventor, appropriator, mobilizer and manipulator of traditions. In the early decades of this century and again in the more recent days of Japanese economic triumphalism, the state has successfully scripted a tradition of harmony and cooperation and cast it in a dominant role. In his chapter, Ito Kimio describes how the penumbral figure of Prince Shotoku, an early seventh-century regent, was turned in prewar years into the apostle of a national cult of harmony, while Frank Upham writes of how a political elite found it expeditious to define and implant a national tradition of non-litigation, a tradition substantially at variance with documentary evidence. In similar fashion, Andrew Gordon explores how leading industrialists over several generations wove and embroidered a tradition of warm paternalism in Japanese industry through reference to native ‘beautiful customs’. They were able in this way to define a Japanese style of capitalism that was not fully capitalist because it conBook reviews 239