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Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics. By LESLIE PINCUS. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xii, 271 pp. X45.00.
At its core a meditation on Kuki Shuzo's famous "Iki" no kozo (the structure of iki) of 1930, Leslie Pincus's remarkable book ranges far beyond that text to provide a major reinterpretation of the role of "culture" in the formation and legitimation of the modern Japanese state. One could say that via a theory of cultural hegemony she breathes new life into prewar Marxist approaches to modern Japanese history. In the process, she provides a useful framework for Taisho and Showa period intellectual history and a plausible explanation for the stream of Japanese cultural nationalism known as Nihonjinron.
Pincus's argument-laid out most fully in the epilogue but anticipated throughout her exhaustive study of the context as well as the text of "Iki" no kozorelies on a creative adaptation of Neil Larsen's theory of aesthetic modernism's role in establishing civil hegemony in late-modernizing states on...