Reconsidering the Modern in Japanese History : Modernity in the Service of the Prewar Japanese Empire

Abstract

Although historians have typically portrayed Japanese imperialism in Asia as motivated primarily by economic or atavistic concerns, this essay suggests that cultural dimensions were more important for many, if not most, of the architects of Japan’s prewar empire. A consideration for how Japanese went about defining modernity in the first half of the twentieth century and how they applied varying definitions of the term to the creation of the Japanese empire in Manchuria reveals that many Japanese genuinely thought their efforts to be progressive, reflecting as they did trends apparent in Japanese society at home. Indeed, creating a modern Japan entailed the creation of not merely an empire, but of an appropriate empire, and one that in key ways prefigured the implementation of new visions of modernity in Japan itself. The centrality of these attitudes was such that they may help explain why many Japanese today continue to feel little need to apologize to their Asian neighbors for prewar Japanese activities. A secondary concern of this essay is theoretical, suggesting that modernity should be conceived more as a cultural artifact involving broadly shared values and goals subject to constant reevaluation rather than as a problematic abstraction. It is an ever-shifting aspiration, one that encourages individuals to reconsider and reconfigure their environments as those environments evolve. Or we might say?responding to Bruno Latour?we are still modern.

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