Book Review

Asia

Most conference volumes explore new research areas and reassess conventional approaches. This one announces the demise of a paradigm and deploys postmodern insights to reorient readers concerning recent Japan. It does so by rejecting a host of stereotypes applied to things Japanese on grounds that such cultural and social practices originated less in reality than in fictions culled from the past for present purposes of national integration and economic development as Japan remade itself into a modern state.	1
This is a landmark book on Japan, about as good as it gets in this business; it is also highly readable. Seventeen contributors, Japanese as well as Western, address the issue of modernity's institutionalization during the long century following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The vehicle for this inquiry is the protean concept of tradition, which figures in two of the book's three epigraphs and suffuses the third. The model for the book is The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983). At root a static classification construed as a pejorative opposed to modernity, tradition should be the categorical antagonist, but as it happens modern goals seem to require it for success.	2
The book benefits from the strong editorial hand of Stephen Vlastos, who contributes a methodological introduction and an essay on prewar agrarian discourse. All the articles are revealing—a rare treat in a collection of this type. A few are stunning, especially Carol Gluck's on images of Edo and Andrew Barshay's on the hermeneutics of Japanese capitalism.	3
In her piece on Edo (Tokyo's name before becoming the "eastern capital" in 1868), Gluck sets out to unpack the layers of "Edo-memory" that mystify the city's history. She shows how residues of the old city were put to use time and again to fabricate a "cultural space [where] modern Japanese negotiated their path to the future by way of the past" (p. 263). A layer forming a negative example, the Tokugawa bakuhan taisei (the political order, based on the shogunate and the 250-plus feudal domains), became a countertrope for the "centralized imperial nation-state" (p. 280) that Japan needed for survival in a Darwinian world. Another negative layer featured Edo-the-city as opposed to the eternal countryside. Sakoku ("closed country") was invoked to contrast early modern isolation (a negative) with modern Japan's positive openness to the world. The shogun's capital could overleap modern limits and be seen as postmodern, serving as a dehistoricized synchronic foil for change useable at any given moment. Gluck concludes that "Edo was an allegory that evoked what was other to the modern" (p. 284).	. . .