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Book Review
Asia
| Stefan Tanaka. New Times in Modern Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 225. $29.95.
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| Over the past several years, the nineteenth century has attracted the attention of a generation of scholars interested in coming to renewed terms with Japan's modern transformation. In this book, Stefan Tanaka returns to the Meiji era (1868–1912) to re-pose the fundamental question of how that vast transformation was accomplished. While his predecessors focused largely on political and economic institutions, Tanaka trains his sights instead on a less tangible infrastructure, offering readers a sustained inquiry into the formation of the conceptual apparatus that allowed a modern world to take shape in, and as, Japan. |
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As the book's title suggests, a crucial constituent of that apparatus is a revolutionary understanding of time as historical: a progressive movement in chronologically measured steps from a displaced past toward a future "horizon of expectations" (p. 7). If this description sounds like common sense, it is because, as the author tells us, progressive time has become our time, long since internalized and naturalized. One of the book's strengths is the opportunity it gives readers to catch sight of the unnatural beginnings of modern time in Japan. Neuzeit, or new time, begins with a destructive act whereby inherited forms of knowledge are severed—now with a fine scalpel, now with a rough saw—from the body of contemporary practice and thought. Taking an initial cue from Walter Benjamin's meditations on history, Tanaka argues that the historical past only comes into being when living traditions yield to isolatable, objective data and time is rendered empty, homogenous, and universal. "To articulate the past," he explains, "a new conceptualization of time was necessary—that of progress, one that separate[s] the present from the past and then re-emplots that past as an earlier, now dead moment" (p. 93). |
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In the first pages of the book, Tanaka gives us an effective demonstration of just how precipitous and disruptive this temporal re-emplotment could be. In 1872, an imperial edict announced that Japan would now reckon time by a new set of coordinates, prompting considerable confusion about festival days, agricultural cycles, and countless other inherited practices: "I hereby abolish the old [lunar] calendar, adopt the solar calendar, and order the realm to obey for eternity" (p. 5). This act of calendrical bravado—not simply a necessary rationalization or a synchronization of Japan to Euro-American time (though it was indeed both of these things)—mandated a fundamental reorganization of the archipelago and the lives of the people who lived there around a new and single axis of power. |
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With this analytic move, the book takes us from time to place, demonstrating in multiple settings how this disembodied and objectified concept of time works to solidify the "body" of which historical time becomes a prime attribute: the nation-state. In successive vignettes, Tanaka catches Meiji intellectuals in the act of creating a Japanese nation by way of an operation that removed "parts of the past from history itself, relocating them to some transhistorical category" (p. 93). In an exemplary instance, Ernest Fenellosa and Okakura Kakuzô, on a government-sponsored mission in 1884 to catalogue important religious artifacts, pried the Buddhist image of the Guze Kannon from its local, ritual context and delivered it to the rarified world of abstract value as a crystalization of a Japanese spirit. This displacement of meaning, suggests Tanaka, produced the idea of Japan as a place that, on the one hand, is exempt from historical change, but, on the other, founds and finds its expression in (national) history. |
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