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Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and its Modern Interpretation
One of the most influential sociologists living today, Robert N. Bellah began his career as a Japan specialist, and has continued to contribute to the field over the past thirty years. Imagining Japan is a collection of some of his most important writings, including essays that consider the entire sweep of Japanese history and the character of Japanese society and religion. Combining intellectual rigor, broad scholarship, and ethical commitment, this book also features a new and extensive introduction that brings together intellectual and institutional dimensions of Japanese history.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
63 people want to read
About the author
Robert N. Bellah
50 books51 followersRobert N. Bellah was Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.
Bellah graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. in social anthropology in 1950. His undergraduate honors thesis on “Apache Kinship Systems” won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize and was published by the Harvard University Press. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sociology and Far Eastern Languages and published his doctoral dissertation, Tokugawa Religion, in 1957. After two years of postdoctoral work in Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, he began teaching at Harvard in 1957 and left 10 years later as Professor of Sociology to move to the University of California, Berkeley. From 1967 to 1997, he served as Ford Professor of Sociology.
Other works include Beyond Belief, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, Varieties of Civil Religion, Uncivil Religion, Imagining Japan and, most recently, The Robert Bellah Reader. The latter reflects his work as a whole and the overall direction of his life in scholarship “to understand the meaning of modernity.”
Continuing concerns already developed in part in “Civil Religion in America” and The Broken Covenant, led to a book Bellah co-authored with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life published by the University of California Press in 1985. The same group wrote The Good Society, an institutional analysis of American society, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1991.
On December 20, 2000, Bellah received the United States National Humanities Medal. The citation, which President William Jefferson Clinton signed, reads:
The President of the United States of America awards this National Humanities Medal to Robert N. Bellah for his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society. A distinguished sociologist and educator, he has raised our awareness of the values that are at the core of our democratic institutions and of the dangers of individualism unchecked by social responsibility.
In July 2008, Bellah and Professor Hans Joas, who holds appointments in both the University of Chicago and Freiburg University in Germany, organized a conference at the Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt on “The Axial Age and Its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present,” attended by a distinguished group of international scholars interested in comparative history and sociology. At the conclusion of the conference, the University of Erfurt awarded Bellah an honorary degree. Harvard University Press published the proceedings of this conference as The Axial Age and Its Consequences in 2012.
In September of 2011 the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press published Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, the result of Bellah’s lifetime interest in the evolution of religion and thirteen years of work on this volume.
Preview a book about Robert Bellah by University of Padua, Italy, Sociology Professor Matteo Bortolini.
News and Articles Commenting on Robert Bellah's Passing
Comments on the Passing of Robert N. Bellah by Jeffrey C. Alexander
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, Sociologist of Religion, Dies at 86
Tricycle, July 31, 2013
In Memoriam: Robert N. Bellah
Pacific Church News [The Episcopal Diocese of California], July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, 1927-2013
Harvard University Press | Blog, July 31, 2013
The Passing of Robert Bellah
Association for the Sociology of Religion, July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, preeminent American sociologist of religion, dies at 86 by Yasmin Anwar,
UC Berkeley News Center, August 1, 2013
Remembering Robert Bellah by Jeff Guhin
Jeff Guhin's blog , Thursday, August 1, 2013
Robert Bellah Departs by Mark Silk,
Religion News Service, August
Bellah graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. in social anthropology in 1950. His undergraduate honors thesis on “Apache Kinship Systems” won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize and was published by the Harvard University Press. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sociology and Far Eastern Languages and published his doctoral dissertation, Tokugawa Religion, in 1957. After two years of postdoctoral work in Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, he began teaching at Harvard in 1957 and left 10 years later as Professor of Sociology to move to the University of California, Berkeley. From 1967 to 1997, he served as Ford Professor of Sociology.
Other works include Beyond Belief, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, Varieties of Civil Religion, Uncivil Religion, Imagining Japan and, most recently, The Robert Bellah Reader. The latter reflects his work as a whole and the overall direction of his life in scholarship “to understand the meaning of modernity.”
Continuing concerns already developed in part in “Civil Religion in America” and The Broken Covenant, led to a book Bellah co-authored with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life published by the University of California Press in 1985. The same group wrote The Good Society, an institutional analysis of American society, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1991.
On December 20, 2000, Bellah received the United States National Humanities Medal. The citation, which President William Jefferson Clinton signed, reads:
The President of the United States of America awards this National Humanities Medal to Robert N. Bellah for his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society. A distinguished sociologist and educator, he has raised our awareness of the values that are at the core of our democratic institutions and of the dangers of individualism unchecked by social responsibility.
In July 2008, Bellah and Professor Hans Joas, who holds appointments in both the University of Chicago and Freiburg University in Germany, organized a conference at the Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt on “The Axial Age and Its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present,” attended by a distinguished group of international scholars interested in comparative history and sociology. At the conclusion of the conference, the University of Erfurt awarded Bellah an honorary degree. Harvard University Press published the proceedings of this conference as The Axial Age and Its Consequences in 2012.
In September of 2011 the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press published Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, the result of Bellah’s lifetime interest in the evolution of religion and thirteen years of work on this volume.
Preview a book about Robert Bellah by University of Padua, Italy, Sociology Professor Matteo Bortolini.
News and Articles Commenting on Robert Bellah's Passing
Comments on the Passing of Robert N. Bellah by Jeffrey C. Alexander
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, Sociologist of Religion, Dies at 86
Tricycle, July 31, 2013
In Memoriam: Robert N. Bellah
Pacific Church News [The Episcopal Diocese of California], July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, 1927-2013
Harvard University Press | Blog, July 31, 2013
The Passing of Robert Bellah
Association for the Sociology of Religion, July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, preeminent American sociologist of religion, dies at 86 by Yasmin Anwar,
UC Berkeley News Center, August 1, 2013
Remembering Robert Bellah by Jeff Guhin
Jeff Guhin's blog , Thursday, August 1, 2013
Robert Bellah Departs by Mark Silk,
Religion News Service, August
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September 21, 2011
I was reading the bibliography of Shutting Out The Sun by Michael Zielenziger, when I came across a couple of books written by Robert N. Bellah, which I found extremely intriguing. I was familiar with him through a book he co-wrote with several other sociologists called habit of the heart that I read post-college that had a profound effect on me. I was bowled over that he was actually a Japanologist by training. I tracked down the two books, Imagining Japan and Tokugawa Religion. I have started reading Imagining Japan and it has been extremely informative and though provoking, so much so that I will comment on several of the essays. I will start by discussing his illuminating introduction where he coalesces his many years of study and reflection into a single narrative on the evolution of Japan Society.
I found many of his ideas helpful in clarifying some of my own uniformed opinions. In particular he discusses the slippery question of the validity of nihonjinron (discourse about the Japanese-their uniqueness, exceptionalism, or particualrism). I have come across books that have had this label but seemed useful in their interpretations of Japanese society (for example Takei Doi’s two books The Anatomy of Dependence and Anatomy of Self). He states that many of these books have truths tot hem but lack a comparative perspective, which is why I suspect Zielenziger chose to compare Japan with Korea in Shutting Out the Sun. He also discusses the influence of German nationalism on nihonjinron that seems to borrow the concept of Gemeinschaft, which suggest that the countries are “relational” rather than “individualistic.” Thus Volksemeinschaft (national or folk community) was translated as kokumin kyoudoutai. It seems that the main consumers of nihonjinron tend to be businessmen and educators, who seem to have more dealings with foreigners than other professions and feel the need to understand one’s own uniqueness that can be helpful in explaining their culture with staples like “the Japanese are community-oriented than westerners,” “the Japanese are close to nature,” etc. He also notes the de-emphasis of the samurai and military tradition in postwar writing that has the farmer peasant as the historical ideal at the center.
I think he rightly focuses on the paradoxical ideas of tradition and modernity that coexist in Japan society today. He frames this debate with in the context of the loaded implications of both terms. Thus he cites the influence of Weber in defining what it is that makes modern societies different from those which preceded it and he draws the conclusion that ”modern capitalism” birth by the Protestant reformation is the main concept in which we can distinguish from the two. However, there was no protestant Reformation, however, there were equivalents like Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, and Marxist movements that never quite overtook the preaxial traditions in Japan, hence the remaining traditional traces of Japanese culture.
He pays particular attention to the role of religion on society. He discusses the role of Shinto in Meiji society and how there was a conscious effort to remove the Buddhist role from government and society that led to emperor worship, nationalism, and ultimately to the imperialistic actions that led to WWII. (I realize that I am doing no justice to his complex explanations and conclusions, but I found them thought provoking and ultimately accurate)
Bellah made an interesting observation about Natsumi Soseki’s preoccupation with individuality. He is the modern giant of Japanese literature and I have read the first volume of his seminal book I Am A Cat, however, his discussion of his intellectual concerns inspires me to seek out more of his literature. It seems that Soseki was interested in the role of individualism in relation to the nation and nationalism. It seems he felt that it was important to know when to the interests of the state and ahead of the individual.
Another apt observation by Bellah states that Japan is only understandable in relation to its neighbors. Thus, modern Japan was shaped by the outside influences of nationalism, capitalism, imperialism, fascism, and democracy. These external influences produced specific Japanese responses to these influences and shaped their path tot modernism.
In another section, Bellah highlights the three major points of development in Japanese history. The first major point was the seventh century appropriation of Chinese culture. The second major point was the Meiji appropriation of Western culture, and the last was the American Occupation and the appropriation of liberal democratic ideas. Therefore, these three historical movements fascinate me, especially the last two since they seems to show distinctly how Japanese culture has arrived where it is as the current second world economic power.
The essay “Continuity and Change in Japanese Society” was a look at how Japan is ancient and modern at the same time, which Bellah describes as the continuity of values in the face of modern change. He spends a lot of time discussing the connection between groups and national integration. The basic loyalty is to the group rather than status or abstract ideal or self-fulfillment. There is a strong sense of native culture, which is “contentless” like Shinto, which can be seen as a “container” or “formless form.” Therefore, contents (like foreign culture) don’t disrupt the container. Furthermore there is a lack of individualism and universalism. Two dysfunctional byproducts of the Japanese pattern are factionalism and xenophobia. In addition, Bellah points out that the emergence of religious/artistic aspect is in relation to the demands of the group on the individual.
“Intellectual and Society in Japan”: (p.163) “Behind the Meiji Restoration stood no Locke or Rousseau, nor Marx or Lenin, no Gandhi or Mao Tse Tung, but only a group of open-minded young men ready to learn, committed to Japan, but with no deterministic vision of the future.”
“Japan’s Cultural Identity” is concerned with the work of the intellectual Watsuji Testuro, who pointed out that “national Narcissism” was extreme in Japan seen in the pervasive use of the term “gaijin” for foreigner. In the Tokugawa period the idea that Japan was on top of the world was commonly held. The fact that the Meiji restoration gave rise to the emperor system rather than a system based on god as in the west is discussed. Furthermore the idea of ethics is base don “koukutai” the emperor and people / “chuu” obligation and loyalty to the emperor from the people / “kou” ancestor and filial piety. Then there’s His attempt to reconcile “particularism” with “universalism” and “individualism.” For him the individual cannot exist outside the group. Watsuji was attracted to theories by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard but finally found them unsatisfactory. This led to a newly Western inspired philosophical rationale manifested in the emperor system and fascism. He felt that the individual couldn’t exist outside the group (unite and fuse). Therefore, he felt that world religions have a false universalism.
There were some other essays of note that I’m to going to comment on but were worthwhile reading: “Notes on Maruyama Masao,” Ienaga Saburo and the Search for Meaning in Modern Japan,” and “The Japanese Emperor As a Mother Figure: Some Preliminary Notes.” The first essays seemed out of place: “The Contemporary Meaning of Kamakura Buddhism.” However, I would like to reiterate that this book of essays is worthwhile for the comprehensive and in depth introduction alone.
I found many of his ideas helpful in clarifying some of my own uniformed opinions. In particular he discusses the slippery question of the validity of nihonjinron (discourse about the Japanese-their uniqueness, exceptionalism, or particualrism). I have come across books that have had this label but seemed useful in their interpretations of Japanese society (for example Takei Doi’s two books The Anatomy of Dependence and Anatomy of Self). He states that many of these books have truths tot hem but lack a comparative perspective, which is why I suspect Zielenziger chose to compare Japan with Korea in Shutting Out the Sun. He also discusses the influence of German nationalism on nihonjinron that seems to borrow the concept of Gemeinschaft, which suggest that the countries are “relational” rather than “individualistic.” Thus Volksemeinschaft (national or folk community) was translated as kokumin kyoudoutai. It seems that the main consumers of nihonjinron tend to be businessmen and educators, who seem to have more dealings with foreigners than other professions and feel the need to understand one’s own uniqueness that can be helpful in explaining their culture with staples like “the Japanese are community-oriented than westerners,” “the Japanese are close to nature,” etc. He also notes the de-emphasis of the samurai and military tradition in postwar writing that has the farmer peasant as the historical ideal at the center.
I think he rightly focuses on the paradoxical ideas of tradition and modernity that coexist in Japan society today. He frames this debate with in the context of the loaded implications of both terms. Thus he cites the influence of Weber in defining what it is that makes modern societies different from those which preceded it and he draws the conclusion that ”modern capitalism” birth by the Protestant reformation is the main concept in which we can distinguish from the two. However, there was no protestant Reformation, however, there were equivalents like Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, and Marxist movements that never quite overtook the preaxial traditions in Japan, hence the remaining traditional traces of Japanese culture.
He pays particular attention to the role of religion on society. He discusses the role of Shinto in Meiji society and how there was a conscious effort to remove the Buddhist role from government and society that led to emperor worship, nationalism, and ultimately to the imperialistic actions that led to WWII. (I realize that I am doing no justice to his complex explanations and conclusions, but I found them thought provoking and ultimately accurate)
Bellah made an interesting observation about Natsumi Soseki’s preoccupation with individuality. He is the modern giant of Japanese literature and I have read the first volume of his seminal book I Am A Cat, however, his discussion of his intellectual concerns inspires me to seek out more of his literature. It seems that Soseki was interested in the role of individualism in relation to the nation and nationalism. It seems he felt that it was important to know when to the interests of the state and ahead of the individual.
Another apt observation by Bellah states that Japan is only understandable in relation to its neighbors. Thus, modern Japan was shaped by the outside influences of nationalism, capitalism, imperialism, fascism, and democracy. These external influences produced specific Japanese responses to these influences and shaped their path tot modernism.
In another section, Bellah highlights the three major points of development in Japanese history. The first major point was the seventh century appropriation of Chinese culture. The second major point was the Meiji appropriation of Western culture, and the last was the American Occupation and the appropriation of liberal democratic ideas. Therefore, these three historical movements fascinate me, especially the last two since they seems to show distinctly how Japanese culture has arrived where it is as the current second world economic power.
The essay “Continuity and Change in Japanese Society” was a look at how Japan is ancient and modern at the same time, which Bellah describes as the continuity of values in the face of modern change. He spends a lot of time discussing the connection between groups and national integration. The basic loyalty is to the group rather than status or abstract ideal or self-fulfillment. There is a strong sense of native culture, which is “contentless” like Shinto, which can be seen as a “container” or “formless form.” Therefore, contents (like foreign culture) don’t disrupt the container. Furthermore there is a lack of individualism and universalism. Two dysfunctional byproducts of the Japanese pattern are factionalism and xenophobia. In addition, Bellah points out that the emergence of religious/artistic aspect is in relation to the demands of the group on the individual.
“Intellectual and Society in Japan”: (p.163) “Behind the Meiji Restoration stood no Locke or Rousseau, nor Marx or Lenin, no Gandhi or Mao Tse Tung, but only a group of open-minded young men ready to learn, committed to Japan, but with no deterministic vision of the future.”
“Japan’s Cultural Identity” is concerned with the work of the intellectual Watsuji Testuro, who pointed out that “national Narcissism” was extreme in Japan seen in the pervasive use of the term “gaijin” for foreigner. In the Tokugawa period the idea that Japan was on top of the world was commonly held. The fact that the Meiji restoration gave rise to the emperor system rather than a system based on god as in the west is discussed. Furthermore the idea of ethics is base don “koukutai” the emperor and people / “chuu” obligation and loyalty to the emperor from the people / “kou” ancestor and filial piety. Then there’s His attempt to reconcile “particularism” with “universalism” and “individualism.” For him the individual cannot exist outside the group. Watsuji was attracted to theories by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard but finally found them unsatisfactory. This led to a newly Western inspired philosophical rationale manifested in the emperor system and fascism. He felt that the individual couldn’t exist outside the group (unite and fuse). Therefore, he felt that world religions have a false universalism.
There were some other essays of note that I’m to going to comment on but were worthwhile reading: “Notes on Maruyama Masao,” Ienaga Saburo and the Search for Meaning in Modern Japan,” and “The Japanese Emperor As a Mother Figure: Some Preliminary Notes.” The first essays seemed out of place: “The Contemporary Meaning of Kamakura Buddhism.” However, I would like to reiterate that this book of essays is worthwhile for the comprehensive and in depth introduction alone.
Displaying 1 of 1 review