Ideology And Practice In Modern Japan

The issue of how Japanese society operates, and in particular why it has `succeeded', has generated a wide variety of explanatory models, including the Confucian ethic, classlessness, group consciousness, and `uniqueness' in areas as diverse as body images and language patterns. In Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan the contributors examine these models and the ways in which they have sometimes been used to create a sense of `Japaneseness', that obscures the fact that Japan is actually an extremely complex and heterogenous society. In particular, `practice' at the micro-level of society is explored to illuminate or express a broader ideology. The contributors investigate a wide variety of subjects - from attitudes to death to the role of education, from film making to gender segregation - to see what can be said about the phenomenon in particular, what it tells us about Japan in general, and what conclusions can be drawn for our understanding of society in the broadest sense.

Looks at the history and ideology behind the construction of kokugo (national language). This book discusses the contributions of Ueda Kazutoshi (1867-1937) and Hoshina Koichi (1872-1955) in the creation of kokugo and moves us one step closer to understanding how the ideology of kokugo cast a spell over linguistic identity in modern Japan.

This magisterial history of Japanese nationalism reveals nationalism to be a contested and pluralistic practice that seeks to center the people in political life. It presents a wealth of primary source material on how Japanese themselves have understood their national identity.

Julia Adeney Thomas turns the concept of nature into a powerful analytical lens through which to view Japanese modernity, bringing the study of both Japanese history and political modernity to a new level of clarity. She shows that nature necessarily functions as a political concept and that changing ideas of nature's political authority were central during Japan's transformation from a semifeudal world to an industrializing colonial empire. In political documents from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, nature was redefined, moving from the universal, spatial concept of the Tokugawa period, through temporal, social Darwinian ideas of inevitable progress and competitive struggle, to a celebration of Japan as a nation uniquely in harmony with nature. The so-called traditional "Japanese love of nature" masks modern state power. Thomas's theoretically sophisticated study rejects the supposition that modernity is the ideological antithesis of nature, overcoming the determinism of the physical environment through technology and liberating denatured subjects from the chains of biology and tradition. In making "nature" available as a critical term for political analysis, this book yields new insights into prewar Japan's failure to achieve liberal democracy, as well as an alternative means of understanding modernity and the position of non-Western nations within it.

Written by leading scholars in the field, this book provides new insights, based on original research, into the full spectrum of modern Japanese political-religious activity: from the prewar uses of Shinto in shaping the modern imperial nation-state to the postwar 'new religions' that have challenged the power of the political establishment.