Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education by Raja Adal (review)

In 1964, Princeton University Press published an edited volume of conference papers titled Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey.1 A brief comparison of its chapters on education with Raja Adal’s monograph, which pairs Japan with a different eastern Mediterranean country, allows for some preliminary observations concerning the arc of historical scholarship on education and modernization in Japan and beyond during the ensuing fifty-five years. Writing during the formative period of area studies and the apogee of modernization theory, contributors to the Princeton volume approach modernization as “a process of long-range cultural and social change accepted by members of the changing society as beneficial, inevitable, or on balance desirable.”2 Turkey and Japan are singled out for analysis because they share an “Asian background and culture” and avoided “outright colonial rule,” which enabled them to chart their own paths to modernization independently and selectively between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.3 These similarities notwithstanding, it is left to the reader to draw any meaningful comparisons between Ronald Dore’s entry on education in Japan and Frederick Frey’s chapter on education in Turkey.4