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Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan
In the decades between the two World Wars, Japan made a dramatic entry into the modern age, expanding its capital industries and urbanizing so quickly as to rival many long-standing Western industrial societies. How the Japanese made sense of the sudden transformation and the subsequent rise of mass culture is the focus of Harry Harootunian's fascinating inquiry into the problems of modernity. Here he examines the work of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who, like their European counterparts, saw modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless change that uprooted the dominant historical culture from its fixed values and substituted a culture based on fantasy and desire. Harootunian not only explains why the Japanese valued philosophical understandings of these events, often over sociological or empirical explanations, but also locates Japan's experience of modernity within a larger global process marked by both modernism and fascism.
What caught the attention of Japanese thinkers was how the production of desire actually threatened historical culture. These intellectuals sought to "overcome" the materialism and consumerism associated with the West, particularly the United States. They proposed versions of a modernity rooted in cultural authenticity and aimed at infusing meaning into everyday life, whether through art, memory, or community. Harootunian traces these ideas in the works of Yanagita Kunio, Tosaka Jun, Gonda Yasunosuke, and Kon Wajiro, among others, and relates their arguments to those of such European writers as George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille.
Harootunian shows that Japanese and European intellectuals shared many of the same concerns, and also stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its late entry into the capitalist, industrial scene should cause historians to view its experience of modernity as an oddity. The author argues that strains of fascism ran throughout most every country in Europe and in many ways resulted from modernizing trends in general. This book, written by a leading scholar of modern Japan, amounts to a major reinterpretation of the nature of Japan's modernity.
What caught the attention of Japanese thinkers was how the production of desire actually threatened historical culture. These intellectuals sought to "overcome" the materialism and consumerism associated with the West, particularly the United States. They proposed versions of a modernity rooted in cultural authenticity and aimed at infusing meaning into everyday life, whether through art, memory, or community. Harootunian traces these ideas in the works of Yanagita Kunio, Tosaka Jun, Gonda Yasunosuke, and Kon Wajiro, among others, and relates their arguments to those of such European writers as George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille.
Harootunian shows that Japanese and European intellectuals shared many of the same concerns, and also stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its late entry into the capitalist, industrial scene should cause historians to view its experience of modernity as an oddity. The author argues that strains of fascism ran throughout most every country in Europe and in many ways resulted from modernizing trends in general. This book, written by a leading scholar of modern Japan, amounts to a major reinterpretation of the nature of Japan's modernity.
480 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2000
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November 13, 2020One of the first things I find myself wanting to say about Harry Harootunian is that he emphasizes synchronic connections rather than diachronic development, meaning that he avoids studies presenting a narrative leading from here to a later there. Instead, he searches for reflections across a plane of development. Traditionally, this is unusual in an academic historian and probably remains so today. One might even ask what makes him an historian and the simple answer is that he is mightily interested in a topic researched by untold historians: the spread of industrial capitalism with its concurrent development of modernism. For Harootunian, this is especially so for the industrialization and modernism that overcame Japan in the 1920's, 30's and 40's.
The almost inevitable second clause of any writer on modernism is that it is very difficult to define, or that it has as many definitions as the writers who confront it. There's not much problem with recognizing what Harootunian means by modern: the encroachment of heavy industry, the flight to the cities from the countryside, the production of commodities for mass consumption, but a reader needs to be very attuned to the niceties of the word once it transforms from modern, to modernity to modernism(this last sometimes printed with a capital M). While Harootunian certainly provides some information on Japan's incredibly rapid industrial development , dating mostly from WWI, to become one of the big industrial states by WWII, he is mostly devoted to modernists, which as scaffolding to reach Harootunian's concerns, I temporarily describe as people who are aware of and pronounce on the modern situation and modernism as an intellectual reaction to that situation.
Most of this book is a survey of Japanese intellectuals reacting to the overcoming of Japan by capitalism in the 1920's and 30's, and it is safe to say that their reaction is intense. Many felt that their identity as Japanese was in question as their country was pulled into the commodity culture of Western industrialization, that their culture was becoming shallow, driven by desire rather than values. It is easy to sympathize with the buzz that accompanied 'the modern girl' as she first appeared on the the streets of Tokyo and other large cities. This young lady with her short skirt, bobbed hair, lipstick and rouge encapsulated the distance she had traveled as she moved from the traditional, patriarchal family in the country to the urban street scene. And it is exactly this jarring juxtaposition of old and new, foreign and Japanese that many of these intellectuals thought was the cause of the alienation, loneliness and cultural fatigue they found everywhere around them. Harootunian agrees and, in fact, really presses this point: 'Modernism was the historical watermark of uneven development, its signature, even though it sought to efface and repress this historical condition of production.' (p. XXI) While all historical periods experience unevenness, that which comes with capitalism is especially intense because the changes and accompanying insecurities never cease. I think it not too farfetched to think that many would agree that: 'In fact, capitalism has no really normal state but one of constant expansion; and expansion requires the permanent production of excess, surplus, in order for it to survive . Part of the price made for continual expansion is the production of permanent unevenness, permanent imbalance between various sectors of the social formations, the process by which some areas must be sacrificed for the development of others, such as the countryside for the city in the early days of Japan's transformation, the colony for the metropole, or even one city for another.' (p.XV)
Many writers, both endemic to Japan and outside of it, thought Japan was unique in this distress from unevenness because of the rapidity of their industrialization and because capitalism was a Western mantle over a more traditional culture. And while it may have been somewhat more fierce in its reaction for exactly these reasons, Harootunian dismisses any claim that it was unique. One of his main points is that the unevenness produced by capitalism is intrinsic to its development; it happens everywhere it takes root. The Japanese writers surveyed here sound so similar to German social critics of the same period that I constantly found myself writing Walter Benjamin!! in the margins. (See the footnote at the end of this essay for examples.) Kracauer's 1930 account of the despair of the German white collar class was powerfully echoed by Aono Suekichi's "The Salaryman's Panic Time. In both of these strikingly similar reports, the main culprit was the loss of expectation of a better life. What had worked a short while ago to get ahead- here it was education in bureaucratic management- was not as needed in a quickly changing economy and the panicked salary man could only foresee progressive impoverishment, replacing thoughts of assimilating into higher classes. Given that industrialization came early to America, I believe it not unjust to add Thoreau's famous quote of "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.", coming as it does after frequent complaints of the cities taking over his beautiful countryside and the degradation of his neighbors' speech from their absortion in the daily newspapers. One of Harootunian's aims is to make us realize that these Japanese writers can sound very much like the writers in our own tradition that we label as 'moderns'.
If modern consciousness was a constant encounter with unceasing change and rootlessness, as these writers in Japan and elsewhere maintain, then what was the result of all this trauma? It was a consciousness that sheltered itself with some kind of minimal awareness that got you through the day. Too much looking ahead or behind was unendurable; it was rooted in the present. 'Everydayness was increasingly understood as the surplus left over from the public realm, the residue left behind by an official public domain of state and society.' (p. 99) This formulation of the everyday was very important to all of Harootunian's surveyed writers; it was the last spark they had to work with, to defend and perhaps to enhance. Just because everydayness was the lived experience of unevenness, it was a site of possibility, of escape from the constraints of the prevailing commodity ideology. Among the many layers of past and present that structure the active life of people as they manage their day, a mesh of grounding value might be conjoined from all these interacting forces.
Some of the writers Harootunian surveys are primarily interested in documenting this life of glaring unevenness that yet manages to maintain a touch of mystery, in part because it is not part of the public domain. Kon Wajjiro wanted to record every unnoticed detail that passed before his eyes-his primary method was with sketch pad and pencil-because the pace of modern life was so incoherent that only the fragments could be caught and experienced. (Walter Benjamin!!) Referring to his youthful nihilism and sense of the meaningfulness of life, Kon wrote: 'As for conquering nothingness, restoring the complete human character is nothing other than situating the position of everyday life.' (p. 195 in Harootunian)
Others saw in the everyday not the emergence of value but the secret retainer of value. Everydayness held traces of the folk culture underlying all Japanese history where community, ritual and repetition provided a constant sphere of value. Watsuji Tetsuro, for example, hoped that by encouraging those traces of the ancient folk, current Japanese society could be stabilized and kept from being Westernized. He believed that climate heavily influenced the different folk cultures that had appeared throughout the world, and Japan's had resulted in the special community relationships that had generated the Japanese spirit. 'The meaning of the "Japanese spirit" unveiled the truth of Japan's capacity to develop a capitalist economic system yet retain its folic character. Present-day Japan took precedence over other, advanced countries because it pointed to a new inflection of capitalism.' (p. 258) Watsuji was part of a movement meant to rescue Japan from the homogeneity of commodity culture but it often ranched into an argument for Japan's cultural exceptionalism. As in Germany, the state appropriated the argument, and it became one of the building blocks of fascism.
Once again, this path of distress from the unevenness of capitalism leading to fascism is not unique to Japan or Germany or any other example. Simply because unevenness is intrinsic to capitalism's development, people will search for different ways to assuage the pain. An appeal to a different kind of capitalism that still has a foothold in mythic uniqueness is a favorite path, and Harootunian makes the case that like unevenness, fascism is a natural fallout from capitalism. This, however, is not Harootunian's main concern in this volume. It is apparent from Harootunian's own methods that he greatly sympathizes with the modernist writers he reviews, and wishes most of all to provide a little explosion of connection with a time and place and development that is important to him. Like Benjamin and Kon, he doesn't want the fragments to go unnoticed.
Footnote: As stated above, resonances with Benjamin are really frequent: Harootunian brings up that many of these writers rejected the narrative form as adequate to communicating an authentic experience of the people. 'This move echoes Walter Benjamin's valorization of the storyteller and his rejection of historical narrative for anecdote.' (p.. XXVI)
Kobayashi's program to rescue actual history from the iron cage of historical reason, his emphasis on the accidents, contingencies and chance that fill everyday life and escape the employment of philosophies of history , is practically a thumbnail description of the Arcades Project
The collapse of language usage into cliches and slogans due to the abundance of mass media is a concern of many of these writers, particularly Kamei. The American movie was considered the overwhelming culprit, showing 'the modern girl' how to dress and use makeup and conform in all ways to the Western consumer culture. All of the Frankfurt School writers shared this concern; I think of Adorno especially in regard to radio and television.
I feel a special connection between Kon, who was particularly interested in documenting the clothes that appeared on the streets, and Benjamin, who famously said that the lace on a woman's collar was more important than the big, public event.
The almost inevitable second clause of any writer on modernism is that it is very difficult to define, or that it has as many definitions as the writers who confront it. There's not much problem with recognizing what Harootunian means by modern: the encroachment of heavy industry, the flight to the cities from the countryside, the production of commodities for mass consumption, but a reader needs to be very attuned to the niceties of the word once it transforms from modern, to modernity to modernism(this last sometimes printed with a capital M). While Harootunian certainly provides some information on Japan's incredibly rapid industrial development , dating mostly from WWI, to become one of the big industrial states by WWII, he is mostly devoted to modernists, which as scaffolding to reach Harootunian's concerns, I temporarily describe as people who are aware of and pronounce on the modern situation and modernism as an intellectual reaction to that situation.
Most of this book is a survey of Japanese intellectuals reacting to the overcoming of Japan by capitalism in the 1920's and 30's, and it is safe to say that their reaction is intense. Many felt that their identity as Japanese was in question as their country was pulled into the commodity culture of Western industrialization, that their culture was becoming shallow, driven by desire rather than values. It is easy to sympathize with the buzz that accompanied 'the modern girl' as she first appeared on the the streets of Tokyo and other large cities. This young lady with her short skirt, bobbed hair, lipstick and rouge encapsulated the distance she had traveled as she moved from the traditional, patriarchal family in the country to the urban street scene. And it is exactly this jarring juxtaposition of old and new, foreign and Japanese that many of these intellectuals thought was the cause of the alienation, loneliness and cultural fatigue they found everywhere around them. Harootunian agrees and, in fact, really presses this point: 'Modernism was the historical watermark of uneven development, its signature, even though it sought to efface and repress this historical condition of production.' (p. XXI) While all historical periods experience unevenness, that which comes with capitalism is especially intense because the changes and accompanying insecurities never cease. I think it not too farfetched to think that many would agree that: 'In fact, capitalism has no really normal state but one of constant expansion; and expansion requires the permanent production of excess, surplus, in order for it to survive . Part of the price made for continual expansion is the production of permanent unevenness, permanent imbalance between various sectors of the social formations, the process by which some areas must be sacrificed for the development of others, such as the countryside for the city in the early days of Japan's transformation, the colony for the metropole, or even one city for another.' (p.XV)
Many writers, both endemic to Japan and outside of it, thought Japan was unique in this distress from unevenness because of the rapidity of their industrialization and because capitalism was a Western mantle over a more traditional culture. And while it may have been somewhat more fierce in its reaction for exactly these reasons, Harootunian dismisses any claim that it was unique. One of his main points is that the unevenness produced by capitalism is intrinsic to its development; it happens everywhere it takes root. The Japanese writers surveyed here sound so similar to German social critics of the same period that I constantly found myself writing Walter Benjamin!! in the margins. (See the footnote at the end of this essay for examples.) Kracauer's 1930 account of the despair of the German white collar class was powerfully echoed by Aono Suekichi's "The Salaryman's Panic Time. In both of these strikingly similar reports, the main culprit was the loss of expectation of a better life. What had worked a short while ago to get ahead- here it was education in bureaucratic management- was not as needed in a quickly changing economy and the panicked salary man could only foresee progressive impoverishment, replacing thoughts of assimilating into higher classes. Given that industrialization came early to America, I believe it not unjust to add Thoreau's famous quote of "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.", coming as it does after frequent complaints of the cities taking over his beautiful countryside and the degradation of his neighbors' speech from their absortion in the daily newspapers. One of Harootunian's aims is to make us realize that these Japanese writers can sound very much like the writers in our own tradition that we label as 'moderns'.
If modern consciousness was a constant encounter with unceasing change and rootlessness, as these writers in Japan and elsewhere maintain, then what was the result of all this trauma? It was a consciousness that sheltered itself with some kind of minimal awareness that got you through the day. Too much looking ahead or behind was unendurable; it was rooted in the present. 'Everydayness was increasingly understood as the surplus left over from the public realm, the residue left behind by an official public domain of state and society.' (p. 99) This formulation of the everyday was very important to all of Harootunian's surveyed writers; it was the last spark they had to work with, to defend and perhaps to enhance. Just because everydayness was the lived experience of unevenness, it was a site of possibility, of escape from the constraints of the prevailing commodity ideology. Among the many layers of past and present that structure the active life of people as they manage their day, a mesh of grounding value might be conjoined from all these interacting forces.
Some of the writers Harootunian surveys are primarily interested in documenting this life of glaring unevenness that yet manages to maintain a touch of mystery, in part because it is not part of the public domain. Kon Wajjiro wanted to record every unnoticed detail that passed before his eyes-his primary method was with sketch pad and pencil-because the pace of modern life was so incoherent that only the fragments could be caught and experienced. (Walter Benjamin!!) Referring to his youthful nihilism and sense of the meaningfulness of life, Kon wrote: 'As for conquering nothingness, restoring the complete human character is nothing other than situating the position of everyday life.' (p. 195 in Harootunian)
Others saw in the everyday not the emergence of value but the secret retainer of value. Everydayness held traces of the folk culture underlying all Japanese history where community, ritual and repetition provided a constant sphere of value. Watsuji Tetsuro, for example, hoped that by encouraging those traces of the ancient folk, current Japanese society could be stabilized and kept from being Westernized. He believed that climate heavily influenced the different folk cultures that had appeared throughout the world, and Japan's had resulted in the special community relationships that had generated the Japanese spirit. 'The meaning of the "Japanese spirit" unveiled the truth of Japan's capacity to develop a capitalist economic system yet retain its folic character. Present-day Japan took precedence over other, advanced countries because it pointed to a new inflection of capitalism.' (p. 258) Watsuji was part of a movement meant to rescue Japan from the homogeneity of commodity culture but it often ranched into an argument for Japan's cultural exceptionalism. As in Germany, the state appropriated the argument, and it became one of the building blocks of fascism.
Once again, this path of distress from the unevenness of capitalism leading to fascism is not unique to Japan or Germany or any other example. Simply because unevenness is intrinsic to capitalism's development, people will search for different ways to assuage the pain. An appeal to a different kind of capitalism that still has a foothold in mythic uniqueness is a favorite path, and Harootunian makes the case that like unevenness, fascism is a natural fallout from capitalism. This, however, is not Harootunian's main concern in this volume. It is apparent from Harootunian's own methods that he greatly sympathizes with the modernist writers he reviews, and wishes most of all to provide a little explosion of connection with a time and place and development that is important to him. Like Benjamin and Kon, he doesn't want the fragments to go unnoticed.
Footnote: As stated above, resonances with Benjamin are really frequent: Harootunian brings up that many of these writers rejected the narrative form as adequate to communicating an authentic experience of the people. 'This move echoes Walter Benjamin's valorization of the storyteller and his rejection of historical narrative for anecdote.' (p.. XXVI)
Kobayashi's program to rescue actual history from the iron cage of historical reason, his emphasis on the accidents, contingencies and chance that fill everyday life and escape the employment of philosophies of history , is practically a thumbnail description of the Arcades Project
The collapse of language usage into cliches and slogans due to the abundance of mass media is a concern of many of these writers, particularly Kamei. The American movie was considered the overwhelming culprit, showing 'the modern girl' how to dress and use makeup and conform in all ways to the Western consumer culture. All of the Frankfurt School writers shared this concern; I think of Adorno especially in regard to radio and television.
I feel a special connection between Kon, who was particularly interested in documenting the clothes that appeared on the streets, and Benjamin, who famously said that the lace on a woman's collar was more important than the big, public event.
November 10, 2022
i appreciate this probably took a Long time to write, and a lot ! of research has gone into it. but… 414 pages??? this could’ve easily been 41 pages if you just made your point
August 9, 2007
Easily the worst book I have ever read in my life. There were TWO good paragraphs in the entire however-many-page monstrosity and this man clearly (a) had no editor and (b) had no clue how to use a fucking period. Ugh.
May 3, 2010
The prose can be tough going, which reveals what a lazy reader I am, but the politics are golden. To point out that fascism is "a kind of inner lining of modernism" and cut from the same cloth as liberalism is a daring argument. The interwar in Japan is undergoing a kind of revival as more and more authors try to examine the many facets of the processes - cultural and social as well as political - that are often dismissed as unidirectional and leading Japan into a 'mistaken modernity' and total war. Harootunian offers the many voices of this period: be prepared to reread sentences and think hard about arguments. You get out what you put in.
April 26, 2007
takes a very cultural approach to ideas like modernity and development, so its easy to criticize from an economic developmental standpoint. also, as harootunian is ventriloquizing through several japanese scholars of the 1940s, and yet he is making points slightly different than theirs, its very difficult to figure out when he and when they are supposed to be talking. lots of compelling thoughts, but too many half-page sentences and three page paragraphs.
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