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KEN C. KAWASHIMA , FABIAN SCHÄFER and ROBERT STOLZ (eds): Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader . (Cornell East Asia Series.) xxxv, 313 pp. Ithaca, NY : Cornell University East Asia Program , 2014. $39. ISBN 978 1 933947 68 6 .
Reviews: East Asia
To discuss a collection of translations and critical essays in a book review of this length would inevitably do violence to the subtlety and diversity of stylistic textures and approaches. It needs to be done, however, because this is a timely and necessary book. Compared to his contemporaries Nishida KitarÅ and Watsuji TetsurÅ, Tosaka Jun (1900-45) has received scant attention in studies of Japanese philosophy. Nishida and Watsuji are complex thinkers, but with them it is still possible to discern a reflex that reduces Japan to an aestheticized essence immune from history and conflict. In contrast, for Tosaka the Japanese "custom" (fuzoku) that presented itself as natural and timeless was historically constituted and ideologically overdetermined. Against philological and hermeneutical approaches that privileged eternity and fixed meanings, Tosaka conceived of the everyday as a force field shot through with antagonisms; against cultural particularity and the boundedness of place, he emphasized a Japan entangled in the global circuits of capital.
The editors' preface positions Tosaka as a Marxist thinker attentive to both political economy and cultural-ideological formations, whose work carries resonances with critics such as Benjamin, Krakauer, Bloch and Gramsci. The introduction is by Harry Harootunian, the historian whose compelling engagements with Tosaka within the cultural discourse of interwar Japan brought Tosaka's thought to the attention of scholars and students outside the confines of Japanese philosophy. The ten translated texts which form the first part...