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Contemporary Japanese Thought. Edited by Richard F. Calichman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 309. Paperback $24.50.
Readers of this publication who frequent Japan likely share a particular pleasure: browsing through the magazine racks in a good Japanese bookstore. There is a powerful (and cheap) intellectual rush to be had in flipping through the journals that specialize in philosophy, theory, and intellectual history: Shiso, Gendai shiso, Yuriika, Gunzo, and the now-lamented Hihyokukan, among others. These widely circulated periodicals publish a broad range of thinkers, some writing on contemporary cultural or political issues, others taking up long-standing philosophical debates. While this academic journalism at times tends toward the faddish and toward overly superficial analysis, on the whole it opens up for Japanese readers an intellectual public space that an American scholar can only envy.
These journals are also remarkably cosmopolitan. They regularly present translations and discussions of recent works written in European and Asian languages, allowing their readers to keep up almost in real time with current intellectual trends in Shanghai, Paris, and New York. Unfortunately, this intellectual generosity is all too infrequently reciprocated: cutting-edge works by Japanese intellectuals are much less likely to be translated into other languages. The situation has been improving in recent years, however, and the present volume makes an important contribution in that direction. It provides fine English-language translations of recent writings by eight prominent intellectuals, all of them familiar figures in Japan's thriving academic journalism.
As Richard Calichman notes in his provocative introduction to Contemporary Japanese Thought, this book does not attempt a comprehensive survey. Instead, the included writings were chosen primarily along two axes: essays with a strong focus...