Content area
Full text
Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Edited by STEPHEN VLASTOS. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. xvii, 328 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).
John Stuart Mill wrote in his Principles of Political Economy, "Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences"-or to "tradition," the contributors to this volume might add.
Mirror of Modernity is one of the most important books on modern Japan to appear in recent years. The purpose of this collection of essays, as of the conferences and workshops in Japan and the United States that preceded it, is to apply to modern Japanese history Eric Hobsbawm's concept of invented traditions (Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terrence 0. Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition [Cambridge University Press, 1983]). The essays vary-and rightly so-in the explicitness with which they address this issue, but every single one raises important questions, and some of the essays are true gems.
Sandwiched between an introduction by editor Stephen Vlastos and an afterword by South Asianist Dipesh Chakrabarty are sixteen chapters grouped under six themes. In the section on "Harmony," Andrew Gordon describes the creation of labormanagement "traditions," Ito Kimio traces the modern appropriations of Prince Shotoku and wa (harmony), and Frank Upham explodes what remains of the myth of Japanese cultural aversion to litigation.
In the next section, "Village," Irwin Scheiner writes on the "imagined community" of the kyodotai (natural, cooperative village), Stephen Vlastos on agrarianist critiques of modernity, Louise Young on mythmaking in the colonization of Manchuria, and Jennifer Robertson on the interconnectedness of two buzzwords of recent decades, kokusaika (internationalization) and furusato (native place).
Part Three, "Folk," consists of essays by Hashimoto Mitsuru and H.D. Harootunian on the ethnologist Yanagita Kunio, and the fourth section, "Sports," of an essay by Inoue Shun on Kano Jigoro's invention of Kodokan judo and another by Lee A. Thompson on the yokozuna (grand champion) and tournament championship systems in sumo. The book's fifth part, "Gender," is comprised of Jordan Sand's essay on physical and conceptual...