Harry Harootunian

Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan

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. Harry Harootunian explores how the Japanese made sense of this sudden transformation and the subsequent rise of mass culture. 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 Japans experience of modernity within a larger global process marked by both modernism and fascism.

Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies

Under globalization, the project of area studies and its relationship to the fields of cultural, ethnic, and gender studies has grown more complex and more in need of the rigorous reexamination that this volume and its distinguished contributors undertake. In the aftermath of World War II, area studies were created in large part to supply information on potential enemies of the United States. The essays in Learning Places argue, however, that the post–Cold War era has seen these programs largely degenerate into little more than public relations firms for the areas they research. A tremendous amount of money flows—particularly within the sphere of East Asian studies, the contributors claim—from foreign agencies and governments to U.S. universities to underwrite courses on their histories and societies. In the process, this volume argues, such funds have gone beyond support to the wholesale subsidization of students in graduate programs, threatening the very integrity of research agendas. Native authority has been elevated to a position of primacy; Asian-born academics are presumed to be definitive commentators in Asian studies, for example. Area studies, the contributors believe, has outlived the original reason for its construction. The essays in this volume examine particular topics such as the development of cultural studies and hyphenated studies (such as African-American, Asian-American, Mexican-American) in the context of the failure of area studies, the corporatization of the contemporary university, the prehistory of postcolonial discourse, and the problematic impact of unformulated political goals on international activism. Learning Places points to the necessity, the difficulty, and the possibility in higher education of breaking free from an entrenched Cold War narrative and making the study of a specific area part of the agenda of education generally. The book will appeal to all whose research has a local component, as well as to those interested in the future course of higher education generally. Contributors. Paul A. Bove, Rey Chow, Bruce Cummings, James A. Fujii, Harry Harootunian, Masao Miyoshi, Tetsuo Najita, Richard H. Okada, Benita Parry, Moss Roberts, Bernard S. Silberman, Stefan Tanaka, Rob Wilson, Sylvia Yanagisako, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

Japan after Japan : social and cultural life from the recessionary 1990s to the present

The prolonged downturn in the Japanese economy that began during the recessionary 1990s triggered a complex set of reactions both within Japan and abroad, reshaping not only the country’s economy but also its politics, society, and culture. In Japan After Japan , scholars of history, anthropology, literature, and film explore the profound transformations in Japan since the early 1990s, providing complex analyses of a nation in transition, linking its present to its past and connecting local situations to global developments. Several of the essayists reflect on the politics of history, considering changes in the relationship between Japan and the United States, the complex legacy of Japanese colonialism, Japan’s chronic unease with its wartime history, and the postwar consolidation of an ethnocentric and racist nationalism. Others analyze anxieties related to the role of children in society and the weakening of the gendered divide between workplace and home. Turning to popular culture, contributors scrutinize the avid consumption of “real events” in formats including police shows, quiz shows, and live Web camera feeds; the creation, distribution, and reception of Pokemon, the game-based franchise that became a worldwide cultural phenomenon; and the ways that the behavior of zealous fans of anime both reinforces and clashes with corporate interests. Focusing on contemporary social and political movements, one essay relates how a local citizens’ group pressed the Japanese government to turn an international exposition, the Aichi Expo 2005, into a more environmentally conscious project. Another essay offers both a survey of emerging political movements and a manifesto identifying new possibilities for radical politics in Japan. Together the contributors to Japan After Japan present much-needed insight into the wide-ranging transformations of Japanese society that began in the 1990s. Contributors. Anne Allison, Andrea G. Arai, Eric Cazdyn, Leo Ching, Harry Harootunian, Marilyn Ivy, Sabu Kohso, J. Victor Koschmann, Thomas LaMarre, Masao Miyoshi, Yutaka Nagahara, Naoki Sakai, Tomiko Yoda, Yoshimi Shunya, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

Japan's Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History

The last days of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of memoration and an unprecedented proliferation of mnemonic devices that have not just reinforced the earlier separation between memory and history but confused their respective functions in such a way as to invite the substitution of one for the other, as if the order of knowledge and experience each represented no longer mattered. This misrecognition was undoubtedly prompted by the effort to retain from the history of World War II the memory of a record of barbarism so unparalleled that it became a moral imperative of each generation to recall the painful moment when millions were systematically murdered. In the lengthening shadow of that historical trauma, we have seen an obsessive enlistment of memory and experience in the court of history to judge those acts of unpardonable and almost unrepresentable terror nations and peoples have inflicted upon each other to enlarge the vast tapestry of horror that even now, a half-century after the event, we still bear witness. Every contemporary instance of mass, genocidal destruction—Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia—jars the

The Economic Rehabilitation of the Samurai in the Early Meiji Period

The Meiji Restoration of 1868, unquestionably the most important event in modern Japanese history, brought in its wake social and economic changes of a revolutionary nature. With the overthrow of the Tokugawa bakufu , the subsequent abolition of the han system, the equalization of classes, and the establishment of a conscript army, the need for a hereditary military class ceased to exist. Certainly, the presence of a samurai class, numbering approximately 1,800,000, or 400,000 families, stranded in a society in process of divesting itself of all feudal fetters, constituted an acute problem. The continued existence of this vast army of unemployed retainers could have easily hamstrung all efforts to modernize. And it is hardly surprising that the new Meiji leaders realized at the inception of the new regime that if the work of the Restoration was to be completed successfully, it was necessary to work out a satisfactory settlement for the samurai class.

‘Modernity’ and the claims of untimeliness

It will be my purpose to show that the examples of alternative modernities we have before us today ultimately remained captive to the cycle of representation and to a logic of the same, despite their heroic efforts to break with both. Where all these alternative and multiple modernities—from the pre-war Japanese effort to ‘overcome the modern’ to more recent attempts to imagine a post-colonial condition—fail to offer a genuinely different conception free from the imposed constraints of a Western model founded on progressive development and achievement is in a reliance on timeless cultural residues. Thus, according to some, they are cultural, not structural, formations, which seek to differentiate received values, timeless and unchanging, from broader social, political and economic systems, which have substituted memory and nostalgia for the historical present. Because they are reflections of national cultures—fixed for all times, invariably derived from irreducible origins—they constitute styles of life identified with the nation-form that can have no universal applicability. In any case, this transmutation of qualitative into quantitative time as the privileged component in a comparative method permits the comprehensive ‘treatment of human culture in all times and places’. More importantly, this conviction in a natural, evolutionary time enabled classifying past cultures and living societies in a continuing stream of homogenous time, some already upstream, others downstream struggling against the currents of their pasts to move upward. The purpose of this scheme was to situate all societies in a trajectory according to their relative distance from the modern present. In it, some societies had not yet reached the present and were still living in an earlier time. This did not mean they were living in an entirely different temporality, but only in the past to the modern present. Social scientific discourse during the Cold War, in the form of modernization and convergence theory, promoted a developmentalism that promised societies not yet in the capitalist present the promise of catching up without recourse to revolutionary transformation. The prospect of catching up implied the status of temporal latecomer and a distance that still had to be covered between a lived past and the present, which was its future. This duration was called a ‘time-lag’. As a result, the perception of the time-lag derives from a reversed culturally disposed optical doubling—seeing one image as two yet assuming at the same time that they are the same, rather than actually perceiving two distinctly different images. This optical doubling was further reinforced by a conception of dematerialized singular time aimed at removing both the scandal of co-existing and multiple temporalities grounded in different experiences and places, and the possibility of seeing them as forms of time capable of behaving as active agents in any present. The aim of such a strategy was to eliminate the possibility of unscheduled and untimely appearances in the present—what historians have dismissed as anachronisms.

Television as Public Mourning: Taiwan's Sad Young Women

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Introduction: Publishing and the Creation of an Alternate Economy of Value

In Mizumura Minae’s semi-autobiographical novel Shishōsetsu from Left to Right (The I-Novel from Left to Right, 1995) the narrator’s mother wheedles an old, vermillion-covered series of books out of a relative in Yokohama before setting o√ for the United States. The one indication we have in Shishōsetsu from Left to Right about the mother’s motivations for making a special trip to borrow a mountain of forty-year-old books comes when we are told that she had obtained the series ‘‘for her daughter, whom she would be raising in the United States.’’∞ This simple phrase captures the mother’s expectations of the series, which will become a singular resource for her daughter, a literary youth who will have little access to other sources of Japanese-language texts. As such, the series would partially predetermine the act of reading both materially and conceptually. Materially it would limit what could be read by its contents; conceptually it would influence how those contents could be interpreted through its organizational framework. That framework—modern Japanese literature— implies that the texts not only have an organic relationship with one

The Seoul Train Station Square and the House of Freedom

This paper historicizes “deserving” citizenship of South Korea by tracing spatial changes and meanings of two places: Seoul Train Station Square and a former textile factory renovated to a homeless shelter. Both have been emblematic space where the most homeless people were populated since the break of the Asian Debt Crisis. However, each place embodies different history of “deserving” citizenship in a complementary way. The square, a politically charged literary and physical topography, became a location of protecting “normal” citizen from potentially violent homeless people. The factory, a spatial marker for the state regulation of laborer, became a site to promote the benevolent image of welfare state for protecting homeless people through a demarcation of short-term street living people—as “deserving” homeless citizens—from long term street living people. The embedded history in two places would be the transition of developmental state towards the welfare state that shifted its capitalist state focus from labor/economic policies to welfare policy: neoliberalization of state governance in South Korea. In concrete, this paper examines how homeless people emerged as new welfare subjects in an urban landscape; how only short-term street living people were selected as Historicization of Homeless Spaces: The Seoul Train Station Square and the House of Freedom 194 proper; how various social agents were involved in the process of implementing homeless policies; and how dualistic capitalist control over labor power, such as regular workers and surplus laborer, was imposed. [

Japan Before Tokugawa: Political Consolidation and Economic Growth, 1500 to 1650 . Edited by John Whitney Hall, Nagahara Keiji, and Kozo Yamamura. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. xiv, 392 pp. Illustrations, Maps, Index.

These papers by leading specialists on sixteenth-century Japan explore Japans transition from medieval (Chusei) to early modern (Kinsei) society. During this time, regional lords (daimyo) first battled for local autonomy and then for national supremacy.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.