Is the modernization of Japan due solely to Western influence, as is commonly thought, or does it derive from its own evolution? This is what Maruyama Masao, a thinker to whom a monograph pays tribute for the first time in French, argued.
Debates on modernity in Japan
A constant concern of Japanese intellectuals, modernity has been at the center of many debates in XXe century, which seem for the most part to be underpinned by the following general questions: Is Japan itself modern? If so, when did it modernize? Did it modernize in the Meiji era (1868-1912), synonymous with the country’s Westernization? Why did it modernize when it is not Western? Bernard Stevens’ book, Maruyama Masao. A Japanese Look at Modernity is an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between non-Western countries and modernity, which is often considered to be a strictly Western product exported afterwards to the rest of the world.
The Japanese word for “modern” is kindai 近代, which literally means “near dynasty/era”, therefore neighbor of mode“recently”, the Latin adverb from which it derives modern. It is a word that is found in ancient texts from China and Japan, with this literal meaning of temporal proximity. It still has this meaning when the Meiji era begins to be called kindaiat the end of XIXe century. It acquired conceptual content in the 1920s and 1930s with the publication of Marxist works that situated Japanese modernization in the Meiji era according to the materialist-historical criterion of the development of capitalism since the opening of the country in 1854 under pressure from Western powers.
After the publication of the Course on the history of the development of Japanese capitalism (1932-1933), Marxist circles debated the concrete characteristics of this capitalism. The debates focused in particular on the question of what stage of history Japan had entered since the Meiji Restoration: for economists and historians of Coursewho adopted the theses of the Japanese Communist Party, the country had experienced a period of modernization that they equated with capitalism and Westernization, but the Meiji Restoration was an insufficient revolution that had given way to an absolutist and semi-feudal regime, which implied in the future a bourgeois democratic revolution and then a socialist revolution; for the Marxists of the Workers and Peasants current, outside the Communist Party, Japan became through the Meiji Restoration an advanced bourgeois state that was characterized by monopolistic capitalism and that was moving towards fascist totalitarianism, which implied for these Marxists only one revolution in the future, the socialist revolution. The first interpretation, which equates the process of modernization of Japan with the Westernization of the Meiji era, but which considers Japan as a country insufficiently modern with feudal vestiges, will have a long posterity.
The interest of Japanese intellectuals in the idea of modernity crystallized in the 1942 round table on the “overcoming of modernity” organized by a literary journal, in the midst of the Asia-Pacific War. The intellectuals present had very varied opinions on modernity, but all agreed to identify it in general with Western modernity, and in particular Japanese modernization with the Western “opening to civilization” brought about in the Meiji era. For the writers claiming to be “Japanese romantics”, the history of Japan since the Meiji Restoration being that of the erosion of Japan by the poison of the West, it was necessary to return to the spirit of loyalty to the emperor in order to overthrow the Anglo-American powers and purify the Japanese national body of Western influence. The philosophers of the Kyoto school, notably Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990), highlighted the “moral energy” of the Japanese people in the war waged against Western colonial domination and for the establishment of a new world order. As we can see, the identification of modernity with the West and the context of open war against the United States since December 1941 led the detractors of modernity to affirm a “surpassing of modernity” that went hand in hand with the overthrow of Western hegemony in the world.
Maruyama on Japan’s Ambivalent Modernity
Maruyama Masao (1914-1996), who completed his higher education and conducted his first research in the history of political thought in the 1930s, represented an important milestone in Japanese debates on modernity after the defeat. He was aware of the Marxist polemic. He was even interrogated by the political police in 1933 for attending a meeting of the Society for the Study of Materialism. A historian of ideas who left his mark on the postwar Japanese intellectual world, particularly through his political commitment to democracy and pacifism, he never stopped asking himself how the modern spirit could progress based on Japanese intellectual resources and what stood in the way of this progress. Bernard Stevens’ book, the first work in French devoted to Maruyama, sets itself the essential task of introducing his work by insisting on the fact that there is a modernity that is not Western, a true Japanese modernity that cannot be summed up as the simple importation of a Western product into a country made of “traditions.”
In the Essays on the History of Political Thought in Japanwritten between 1940 and 1944, Maruyama in fact posits the hypothesis of a Japanese modernity whose seeds, notably expressed in the thought of Ogyû Sorai (1666-1728), would have appeared in the Edo period (1603-1868), but which would not have fully blossomed in the Japan of the Meiji era, often considered, as we have seen, as the period when the country began its modernization through its Westernization. Maruyama emphasized Sorai’s modernity by highlighting in particular his positivist conception of norms (according to which these are constructed by men, and not given to them by nature), and consequently the importance of the break made by this thinker between the natural order of the universe and the socio-political dimension of the human community, thus considering his thought as a modern conception of politics as the creation of the social order by the subject.
It is also worth noting that, since the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese historians have been elucidating the modern aspects of Edo society, including its considerable literacy and its “industrious revolution” (Hayami Akira). Unlike Marxists and intellectuals who equated modernization with the Westernization of the economy or culture, Maruyama therefore supported what could be called the “thesis of immanent modernization.”
As B. Stevens says, “Western-type modernization (in the Meiji era) would then be, to a certain extent, a simple accelerator of an autonomous logic. And to another extent a stifling of its own potentialities” (p. 25). The author claims that the political regime established by this ambivalent modernization of the Meiji era contained the “seeds of authoritarian and expansionist nationalism (in contradiction with the modernist logic of Edo)” (p. 31). In a chapter where Maruyama’s analyses are compared to Arendt’s interpretation of totalitarianism, the “totalitarian” dimension of Japanese ultranationalism (1930-1945) is presented by the author as one of the fruits of this modernity, which “forces us to take into account the Japanese phenomenon in any discussion concerning modernity and the critique of modernity – given the fact that, if Japan of the XXe century is very modern in the same way as the West, it is modern in terms of a cultural heritage which is specific to it and the consideration of which should be able to enrich current discussions on modernity in Europe” (p. 70).
Ultranationalism would therefore not be a simple accident of the Meiji institutions (interpretation of moderate conservatives) or an inevitable consequence of the economic infrastructure (Marxist interpretation), but it would be due, according to Maruyama, to a modernization of consciences abandoned halfway, which compromised the formation of a true democratic life, with a true public space of expression and a complete awareness of political responsibility. In Thinking in Japan (1961), Maruyama criticizes the weakness of subjective autonomy among the Japanese and characterizes Japanese thought by the absence of a unified intellectual system that would give the Japanese, as Christianity and humanism did in Europe, a sense of universality. Because of this absence, they would have tended not to integrate, but only to superimpose foreign influences, “leaving intact a background of archaic substratum whose resurgence can occur in an unexpected and uncontrollable manner” (p. 33), which would have been the case during the ultranationalist period.
Multiple modernizations
In Japan, many continue to equate modernity with Western modernity, but it has been a commonly held view among historians since at least the 1980s that there were elements of modernity before the country’s Westernization. It is unfortunate that Stevens makes no reference to the plethora of secondary literature in Japanese on modernity and the much-discussed Maruyama, since this reference could have contributed to a better understanding of the richness of Japanese debates on modernity and, since the 1980s, on postmodernity, in a context of rising cultural nationalism.
The current state of Japanese research on modernity is therefore very different from the French context, where the idea is beginning to be presented that it is possible to be “modern without being Western”. It is no longer a question of thinking in terms of the evolution of a single modernity, an ideal that has not flourished anywhere, neither in a fantasized West nor even in the countries considered to be the most advanced. It is therefore not a question of seeing whether modernity is accomplished or “unaccomplished” in a country (p. 35), but of thinking of a plurality of modernities. Because, according to the critique of Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924-2012), even the Tests Maruyama’s works do not escape this idea of achievement or incompleteness, surreptitiously posing a model that remains Western (even though the avowed intention would be to affirm that one can be “modern without being Western”). Maruyama himself realized this flaw a posteriori and came to affirm that there are “multiple modernizations”. Let us therefore hope, in this French context of discovery of the existence of a Japanese modernity, that the introduction of B. Stevens will accelerate the reception of Maruyama’s work and thereby contribute to reflections on “multiple modernizations”.