Nearly a half century after Japan opened its doors to Western knowledge, intellectual discourse there took a sharp turn inward. Drawing on the cultural resources of a forgotten past, Japanese thinkers of the 1910s and 1930s imagined a realm of authenticity impervious to the fragmenting processes of modernization. Ultimately these thinkers equated authenticity with something irreducibly Japanese and in so doing became complicit, even instrumental, in a repressive and imperialist state apparatus. How did this cultural complicity take shape, and what does it reveal more generally about the troubled relationship between modernity and national culture? To explore these questions, Leslie Pincus focuses on the work of philosopher Kuki Shuzo, in particular his classic study of Edo style, "Iki" no kozo - a text that demonstrates with unusual clarity the philosophical sources, the modernist affiliations, and the ideological implications of this highly aestheticized discourse on culture in interwar Japan. Pincus argues that Japanese intellectuals attempted to resist the inroads of Western hegemony and reclaim what they perceived as a threatened cultural authenticity. But after several generations of assimilation with a modernized West, they had no choice but to delineate Japaneseness against, and within, dominant discursive modes derived from the West. She discovers that these intellectuals were in fact reacting to the precipitous transformation of their own social world, in which the emergence of mass culture and the specter of mass politics promised a Japan of drastically different proportions. Ultimately their own struggle for hegemony over the form and content of national culture would lead tothe most disastrous political consequences.

In modern Japan, where the mechanisms of producing national consensus and social conformity operate with considerable force and efficacy, the democratic credentials of public life are a pressing question. Beginning with the Pacific War and extending through the early 1970s, this issue of positions explores a number of sites in Japan's postwar history where individuals and groups endeavored to reconfigure the social, cultural, and political dimensions of public space and public life. While the collection does not offer comprehensive coverage of all the manifestations of "public" in postwar Japan, it presents a series of "local" studies which, taken together, provide a suggestive map of the contours of the public in postwar Japan.