This book describes firstly a Japanese modernity which is readable
not only as a modernising, but also as a Britishing, and secondly
modernist attempts to overhaul this British universalism in some
well-known and some less-known Japanese texts. From the
mid-nineteenth century, and particularly as hastened by the spectre
of China in the First Opium War, Japan's modernity was bound up
with a convergence with British Newtonian cosmology, something
underscored by the British presence in Meiji Japan and the British
education of key Meiji state-makers. Moreover the thinking behind
Britain's own unification in the long eighteenth century,
particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, is echoed strikingly
faithfully in the 1860s-70s work of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nakamura
Masanao, and other writers in the 'Japanese Enlightenment'.
However, from around the end of the Meiji era, we can see a
concerted and pointed response to this British universalism, its
historiography, its basis in the sovereign individual subject, and
its spatial mapping of the world. Elements of this response can be
read in texts including Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, Watsuji Tetsuro's
Fudo (Climate and Culture), Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's In'ei Raisan (In
Praise of Shadows), Kawabata Yasunari's Yukiguni (Snow Country),
and various work of the mid-period Kyoto School. Rarely understood
in terms of its British specificity, this response should have
something to say to modernist studies more generally, since it
aimed at a pluralism and de-universalisation that was difficult for
mainstream British modernism itself. Indeed the strength of this
de-universalisation may be precisely why these 'native' Japanese
modernist tendencies have not much been accepted as modernism
within the Anglophone academy, despite this field's apparent
widening of its ground in the twenty-first century.
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