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In the summer of 1942 Japan's leading cultural authorities gathered in Tokyo to discuss the massive cultural, technological, and intellectual changes that had transformed Japan since the Meiji period. They feared that without a sufficient understanding of these developments, the Japanese people would lose their identity to the reckless and rapid process of modernization. The participants of this symposium hoped to settle the question of Japanese cultural identity at a time when their country was already at war with England and the United States. They presented papers and held roundtable discussions analyzing the effects of modernity from the diverse perspectives of literature, history, theology, film, music, philosophy, and science. Taken together, their work represents a complex portrait of intellectual discourse in wartime Japan, marked not only by a turn toward fascism but also by a profound sense of cultural crisis and anxiety. Overcoming Modernity is the first English translation of the symposium proceedings. Originally published in 1942, this material remains one of the most valuable documents of wartime Japanese intellectual history. Richard F. Calichman reproduces the entire proceedings and includes a critical introduction that provides thorough background of the symposium and its reception among postwar Japanese thinkers and critics. The aim of this conference was to go beyond facile and unreflective discussions concerning Japan's new spiritual order and examine more substantially the phenomenon of Japanese modernization and westernization. This does not mean, however, that a consensus was reached among the symposium's participants. Their tense debate reflects the problematic efforts within Japan, if not throughout the rest of the world at the time, to resolve the troubling issues of modernity.
In Overcoming Modernity, which contains the last writings from Yuasa, the prominent Japanese scholar reconsiders the modern Western paradigm of thinking and in its place proposes a more holistic worldview. A wide range of topics are examined, including the relationships between language, being, psychology, and logic; Jung's concept of synchronicity; the Yijing (Book of Changes); paranormal phenomena; physics and metaphysics; mind and body; and teleology. Through these explorations, engaging a wide range of Western and East Asian thought, Yuasa offers an alternative to the scientific worldview inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new paradigm involves the integration of space-and-time and mind-and-body, thematics brought together through what Yuasa calls "image-thinking," a mode of thinking that incorporates image-experience.
Between the two world wars, Japanese society underwent a massive industrial transformation. The author explores the differences between the United States, England and France which safely modernised and Japan which moved unfortunately towards fascism.
Yoshimi questioned the very nature of thought, arguing that thinking is less a subjective act than an opening to alterity. His works were central in drawing Japanese attention to the problems inherent in Western colonialism & to the cultural importance of Asia.
This volume is a major reconsideration of Japanese late modernity and national hegemony which examines the creative and academic works of a number of influential Japanese thinkers. The author situates the process of Japanese knowledge production in the interface between the immediate historical and the wider socio-economic and politico-cultural contexts accompanying the Japanese post-war experience of modernity. This book will be of great value to anyone interested in the history of contemporary Japanese culture and society.
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.
At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history—when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism—David Scott argues the need to reconceptualize the past in order to reimagine a more usable future. He describes how, prior to independence, anticolonialists narrated the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism as romance—as a story of overcoming and vindication, of salvation and redemption. Scott contends that postcolonial scholarship assumes the same trajectory, and that this imposes conceptual limitations. He suggests that tragedy may be a more useful narrative frame than romance. In tragedy, the future does not appear as an uninterrupted movement forward, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs. Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James’s masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, James told the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution as one of romantic vindication. In the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses James’s recasting of The Black Jacobins to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy. In an epilogue, he juxtaposes James’s thinking about tragedy, history, and revolution with Hannah Arendt’s in On Revolution. He contrasts their uses of tragedy as a means of situating the past in relation to the present in order to derive a politics for a possible future.
In the decades between the two World Wars, Japan made a dramatic entry into the modern age, expanding its capital industries and urbanizing so quickly as to rival many long-standing Western industrial societies. How the Japanese made sense of the sudden transformation and the subsequent rise of mass culture is the focus of Harry Harootunian's fascinating inquiry into the problems of modernity. Here he examines the work of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who, like their European counterparts, saw modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless change that uprooted the dominant historical culture from its fixed values and substituted a culture based on fantasy and desire. Harootunian not only explains why the Japanese valued philosophical understandings of these events, often over sociological or empirical explanations, but also locates Japan's experience of modernity within a larger global process marked by both modernism and fascism. What caught the attention of Japanese thinkers was how the production of desire actually threatened historical culture. These intellectuals sought to "overcome" the materialism and consumerism associated with the West, particularly the United States. They proposed versions of a modernity rooted in cultural authenticity and aimed at infusing meaning into everyday life, whether through art, memory, or community. Harootunian traces these ideas in the works of Yanagita Kunio, Tosaka Jun, Gonda Yasunosuke, and Kon Wajiro, among others, and relates their arguments to those of such European writers as George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille. Harootunian shows that Japanese and European intellectuals shared many of the same concerns, and also stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its late entry into the capitalist, industrial scene should cause historians to view its experience of modernity as an oddity. The author argues that strains of fascism ran throughout most every country in Europe and in many ways resulted from modernizing trends in general. This book, written by a leading scholar of modern Japan, amounts to a major reinterpretation of the nature of Japan's modernity.
This book is an inquiry into ki-energy, its role within Eastern mind-body theory, and its implications for our contemporary Western understanding of the body. Yuasa examines the concept of ki-energy as it has been used in such areas as acupuncture, Buddhist and Taoist meditation, and the martial arts. To explain the achievement of mind-body oneness in these traditions he offers an innovative schematization of the lived body. His approach is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, offering insights into Western philosophy, religion, medical science, depth psychology, parapsychology, theater, and physical education. To substantiate the relationship that ki-energy forms between the human body and its environment, Yuasa introduces contemporary scientific research on ki-energy in China and Japan, as well as evidence from acupuncture medicine and from the experience of meditators and martial arts practitioners. This evidence requires not only a rethinking of the living human body and of the mind-body and mind-matter relation, but also calls into question the adequacy of the existing scientific paradigm. Yuasa calls for an epistemological critique of modern science and explores the issue of the relation of teleology to science.
The twelve chapters in this volume seek to overcome the nationalist paradigm of Japanese repression and exploitation versus Korean resistance that has dominated the study of Korea’s colonial period (1910–1945) by adopting a more inclusive, pluralistic approach that stresses the complex relations among colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. By addressing such diverse subjects as the colonial legal system, radio, telecommunications, the rural economy, and industrialization and the formation of industrial labor, one group of essays analyzes how various aspects of modernity emerged in the colonial context and how they were mobilized by the Japanese for colonial domination, with often unexpected results. A second group examines the development of various forms of identity from nation to gender to class, particularly how aspects of colonial modernity facilitated their formation through negotiation, contestation, and redefinition.