Book Review

Asia

Julia Adeney Thomas's book is a bold and ambitious attempt to reimagine the course of modern Japanese history. She does this by tracing the changing conceptions of "nature" in Japan from the early 1800s through the 1930s and noting how each shaped subjectivity and political action in a different way. At the same time, she also explores how historians have described "Japan's particular engagement with modernity" and offers an original view of Japan's "modernity."	1
Thomas reimagines modern Japan on three different levels. She begins by identifying the prevailing discourse on "nature" at three historical moments—Tokugawa (1600–1867), Meiji (1868–1912) and Taish and early Sh wa (1912–1945)—and elegantly characterizes each. The Tokugawa discourse on nature is "spatial"; the Meiji discourse is "temporal"; and that of Taish and early Sh wa is, in her clever phrase, "ultranational and ultranatural."	2
Thomas also is interested in how the leading thinkers in Tokugawa, Meiji, and Taishå-early Shåwa used nature to validate their own positions in broader intellectual and political fields. Her accounts of intellectuals articulating or contesting positions within these fields comprise the second level of her analysis. Tokugawa conceptions of nature, she observes, were diverse but similarly spatial and centripetal and combined "stability and dynamism." The Chinese conception of chågoku, or "central kingdom," which is both spatial and centripetal, is one of her examples. Japanese Confucians used this conception to describe Japan as the central kingdom, whereas nativists saw the emperor and Kyoto, the old imperial capital, as the center. Dissenters like Andå Shåeki and Hirata Atsutane subversively located the center in country villages, and late Tokugawa thinkers advanced a conception of nature that was more fluid and centerless. But Thomas says little about the tensive relationship of "stability and dynamism" in Tokugawa discourses on nature, perhaps because she is most interested in their spatial dimension.	3
The Meiji period, she argues, brought an important redefinition of nature: it was no longer "spatial" but "temporal." She sees the pioneering intellectual Kat Hiroyuki as the architect of a new conception of what she terms an "evolutionary nature." His conception was also quintessentially statist and had political implications that were not lost on his critics Baba Tatsui and Ueki Emori, who promoted the "liberated individual" as a foil to the state. Those familiar with the Meiji material will find Thomas's account of the Meiji redefinition of nature plausible but lacking in complexity and nuance.	. . .