Julia Adeney Thomas

Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology

1. Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, trans. Mikiso Hane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). This volume was originally published as Nihon seiji shisōshi no kenkyū (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1965). The essays it comprises were published in the 1940s. Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology. By Julia Adeney Thomas. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001. xv, 239 pages.

Power Made Visible: Photography and Postwar Japan's Elusive Reality

37.50.

The Shock of the Anthropocene: the Earth, history, and us

Despite the impact of the Allied occupation (1945–52), Japanese photography in the immediate postwar period was neither “art” nor “documentary” by American definitions. Instead, as the vigorous 1953 debate over “realism” shows, photographers such as Domon Ken and critics such as Tanaka Masao and Watanabe Kosho insisted that photography—at least real photography—was a political practice. It was political not because its aesthetic accomplishments bolstered national prestige in the arts nor because it provided visual evidence for public policies by documenting social conditions. A real photograph, whether of a beauty, a beggar, or a bourgeois, attempted to make manifest a reality often invisible to the naked eye: the reality of power and how power ought to work after Japan’s defeat. These photographic practices show us that postwar conditions were so unsettled that the very nature of social reality—what it was, how one should see it, what one could hope for—was still undefined. By participating in the ideological effort to “constitute reality,” photography in Japan sought to establish political, social, and aesthetic norms that were taken for granted elsewhere.

Why Do Only Some Places Have History?: Japan, the West, and the Geography of the Past

rather offering attention to ‘spaces and moments that exhibit its vulnerability to rifts and fissures’. In this sense, I think some more explicit discussion of the terms on which subaltern agency can be shaped and articulated in relation to such spatially differentiated processes would have been helpful. Again this is implicit in various parts of the text, for example, in relation to Heather Streets-Salter’s chapter on anti-colonialism and Eileen Ford’s work on insurgent citizenship. A key challenge for a ‘World Histories From Below’ project is to delineate new ways of understanding subaltern agency, given the restricted ways it has often been understood in primarily nation-centred histories – such as in the bulk of work in the Subaltern Studies project. This is a particularly significant task, given the ways that in recent critical work on that project such as Vivek Chibbers’ Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London, 2013) a rather flattened sense of universalized resistance based around basic needs has emerged. Opening up a more differentiated terrain through which we might recast subaltern agency in more globalized terms and in relation to the uneven geographies of global processes is thus important. It also, necessarily, speaks to an important set of political questions. World Histories From Below is certainly not shy about politics, and the broader political commitments of the contributors are pretty clear. What is less apparent is the terms on which left politics and World Histories From Below are envisioned here. In this sense if different iterations of ‘history from below’ were animated by particular political commitments in particular political conjunctures, then how might we understand the political projects linked to articulations of world histories from below. A crucial question here is to what extent do different ways of envisioning world histories from below relate to different potential political interventions and imaginaries? In this sense can we envision world histories from below as helping to recast a vision of left internationalism in ways which challenge and decentre the nation and offer different ways and basis of imagining solidarities and transnational connections. In a context when a global left imaginary and politics is under pressure and suffering retrenchment World Histories From Below suggests a significant range of resources for thinking differently about both the past and present. It offers a rewarding and important text which pulls off a significant feat – of both providing a survey of an important set of political debates for students while simultaneously intervening in these debates in prescient ways.

Historia económica en el Antropoceno: cuatro modelos

Abstract: This essay analyzes why historians in Japan as in the West concentrate on only a few places, primarily their home countries and Europe. It responds to the challenge laid down by Luke Clossey and Nicolas Guyatt in their 2013 study, “It’s a Small World After All,” which revealed the parochialism of British, Canadian, and U.S. historians. By examining the geographical focus of the historical profession in Japan, I show that history confronts the problem not just of one “small world” but of many, alternative “small worlds.” History, in short, is beset by contending parochialisms. Moreover, as the data reveals, the distorted geographical emphasis of contemporary historians bears surprisingly strong traces of late nineteenth-century Western European imperialism. My findings raise three questions: (1) why does the practice of history everywhere create distorted maps, (2) should our ideal as historians be proportional representation in terms of geography and population or should it be greater clarity as to why some places are chosen over others, and (3) can world history transcend these small incongruous worlds and supply a single over-arching perspective? As I will argue, distorted geography is not in itself a problem for historians, nor is it our mandate to represent the past in accord with current population figures. The problem, rather, is our reluctance to remap the historical terrain formed in the 1890s in response to urgent new questions about human experience, in particular our environmental challenges.

Reclaiming Ground: Japan's Great Convergence

Under the global threat of the Anthropocene, environmental history and economic history are coming together to understand our predicament. This new field of “eco-economic history” traces the ecological impact of the startling rise in global economic productivity over the last two centuries. No longer is nature treated as an externality and damage to non-renewable resources discounted. I identify four basic eco-economic models emerging in this literature. The one I call retro-modernist returns us to a Euro-centered world for both the problem’s origins and its remedies. Three more convincing models, double-layered modernity, parallel modernities, and multi-scalar approaches, expand our understanding of how we arrived at this catastrophic juncture and what we might do about it.

History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value

Japan scholars relegated to the shadows, haunting the debate like hungry ghosts with no ground to stand on. Not only intellectually but also institutionally, The Great Divergence unintentionally helped obscure Japan from view because it appeared in 2001 just as the juggernaut of Chinese economic dominance rose above the horizon. University administrators, history departments, and global historians writing, as most do, from that perspective of Europe seemed to have found an ‘Asia’ sufficient to their wants, and many desired no other. Even though Japan remained the second and then the third largest economy in the world during the first decade of the twenty-first century, its historical and theoretical importance ebbed. In considering the rise of modern prosperity, it no longer seemed essential to think about Japan. At times Japan even appeared to be written out of world history and global consciousness. In these embattled circumstances, when Ian J. Miller organized a panel exploring Japan’s Great Convergence for the March 2013 Association of Asian Studies meeting, the room was packed. The papers given that day showcased the work of the three contributors to this forum. Inquiring into Japan’s development over three centuries and in three different ways, Federico Marcon, Ian J. Miller, and Robert Stolz in conversation with Brett Walker and myself laid the grounds for a new history of Japan’s convergence as opposed to China’s divergence. The idea was not entirely novel. For instance, Patrick K. O’Brien, analyzing Pomeranz’s achievement in 2010, briefly acknowledges ‘the convergence of Japan’ as opposed to China, India, and Southeast Asia. 4 Brett Walker had written of ijin naru shuren (the great convergence) 1 See, for instance, Manning, ‘AHR Forum’, and O’Brien, ‘Metanarratives in Global Histories of