Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology

Twentieth Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power #12

by Julia Adeney Thomas

Julia Adeney Thomas turns the concept of nature into a powerful analytical lens through which to view Japanese modernity, bringing the study of both Japanese history and political modernity to a new level of clarity. She shows that nature necessarily functions as a political concept and that changing ideas of nature's political authority were central during Japan's transformation from a semifeudal world to an industrializing colonial empire. In political documents from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, nature was redefined, moving from the universal, spatial concept of the Tokugawa period, through temporal, social Darwinian ideas of inevitable progress and competitive struggle, to a celebration of Japan as a nation uniquely in harmony with nature. The so-called traditional "Japanese love of nature" masks modern state power. Thomas's theoretically sophisticated study rejects the supposition that modernity is the ideological antithesis of nature, overcoming the determinism of the physical environment through technology and liberating denatured subjects from the chains of biology and tradition. In making "nature" available as a critical term for political analysis, this book yields new insights into prewar Japan's failure to achieve liberal democracy, as well as an alternative means of understanding modernity and the position of non-Western nations within it.

Genres: History, Japan

254 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 9, 2001

Reviews

[Yumi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first time I read this book, I found it disorienting and uninformative. Nearly five or six years later, I find it to be the exact opposite: precise, clear, and substantive. It is one of the best books in Japanese intellectual history that I've read, primarily because it is very conceptually creative, giving new life to old, well-known texts and ideas, and also because Thomas has such a good handle on complicated terms and topics (like subjectivity, liberalism, nature, evolutionary theory, etc) that she is able to give crystal clear and historically-situated explanations of each of them. You know she has really digested her sources, made them her own. The clarity of her writing parallels Sarah Thal's own skill in Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods.