Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity

by Kevin Michael Doak

From 1935 to 1945, the Japan Romantic School (Nihon Romanha), a group of major intellectuals and literary figures, explored issues concerning politics, literature, and nationalism in ways that still influence cultural discourse in Japan today. Kevin Doak's timely study is a broad critique of modernity in early twentieth-century Japan. He uses close readings and translations of texts and poems to suggest that the school's interest in romanticism stemmed from its attempt to surmount the "cultural crisis" of lost traditions. This attempt to overcome modernity eventually reduced the movement's earlier critical impulses to expressions of nationalist longing.

Genres: Japan

244 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1994

Reviews

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there's one thing this fantastic collection of biographies should prove, it's that Japan's imperial period possess an unexpected depth that would be missed by those writing about it from the perspective of political science alone. In some of these biographies one can see a level of philosophical awareness on par with Oswald Spengler or Carl Schmitt. Doak highlights aspects of these intellectuals that are certainly far superior to what was revealed about them in the rather muddled symposium that some of them participated in in 1942, now available in English as Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan. (Doak discusses this in his conclusion, and offers a hypothesis as to why the symposium failed.)

Yasuda Yojuro, I learned from this book, possessed a traditionalist's sense of aesthetic and spiritual decline over the ages, typified by his interpretation of Goethe's /Sorrows of Young Werther/: "When a reliance on reason overthrew the arbitrary will of the monarch, it also introduced its own arbitrariness under the surface of the rule of law. Honesty and passion were no longer enough; in order to survive in this new world, one had to deceive one's closest friend." But Yasuda knows that we moderns cannot return to primeval perfection. The only possibility to restore our humanity is irony, a beauty which Japan has possessed since its earliest days. Yasuda's subtle aesthetic of "Japan as irony" became melancholic as he watched the Second Sino-Japanese War unfold and his countrymen become possessed by a mania for "world historical" ideology; his wartime essays are a valiant attempt to to aestheticize that ideology. His aesthetic depth becomes even more pathetic for those of us reading his words from the 21st century, when the number of ironists in Japan has decidedly dwindled.

To offer another example: Kamei Katsuichiro gained much from reexamining the teleological certainty of Japanese proletarian literature. The proletarian novelist hungers for the glorious moment when he as bourgeoise is reunited with the working class; he is unable to embrace his actual mental state, a "deep confusion that offers no solution," despite the power this confusion contains, found in books like /The Brothers Karamazov/.

It would be overreaching to say that Japan is an aesthetic void today. There are certainly more ironists in Japan and France than there are in Britain and America. But the grip of ideology is tighter than ever, and the flame of antimodern irony flickers perilously. Prospective ironists in any country would do well to read this book and think about what the world was really like on the brink of World War II, and what it is like today.

[Iulia · Rating 4 out of 5]

REALLY loved this, partly due to the discussion on the artificially constructed tradition and the blend between aesthetics and politics. The illusion of a 'return to a purity of Japan' through folklore ultimately served the same discourse as modern nationalism. always love reading about Japan's adoption and adaptation of Western ideals and how often these end up being coopted into serving different purposes, having not developed on their own, naturally, as most literary movements emerge