The uncertainty of the self: Japan at century's end

World Policy Journal, Summer, 1999 by Masaru Tamamoto

"I live as a novelist marked by the deep wounds of Japan's ambiguity," Kenzaburo Oe told the Swedish Academy in accepting the 1994 Nobel Prize in literature.(1) He depicted how Japan's ambiguity casts a dark shadow over the country's achievements in the modern era, and how it traps the intellectual class, a trap from which no modern Japanese intellectual has been able to escape.

This ambiguity, Oe explained, began 120 years ago, when Japan opened itself to the world, bringing to an end more than two centuries of seclusion, and embarked on a frenzied program of modernization. To this day, long after Japan became a modern economy, this ambiguity wields tremendous power and continues to tear the country and its people apart. In the international realm, Oe fears, Japan's ambiguity means isolation and the inability to relate to the rest of the world:

Japan's modernization took place using the West as model. But Japan is situated in Asia, and the Japanese have sought to preserve their traditional culture. On the one hand, this ambiguous path pushed the country and its people into the role of aggressors in Asia. On the other hand, Japanese culture, which is supposed to have become completely open toward the West, remains obscure, if not incomprehensible, to the West. Furthermore, this ambiguity has led to Japan's political, social, and cultural isolation in Asia.(2)

Oe is expressing an enduring theme in the history of modern Japanese thought (Nihon shiso-shi), which saw its beginning with the country's opening to the world. The primary goal of Japanese thought has been to establish a national identity in an alien world. Torn between the idealized poles of the West and Asia, the Japanese intellectual search for identity has been an elusive affair. Because the search has been framed between two imagined extremes, there is no way to reconcile the two; thus any definition of Japan can only be paradoxical.

Requiem for Japanese Thought

This sort of dualism has been a common feature of non-Western political thought in the modern era, but there has been a peculiar lack of any ideology of native authenticity in Japanese thought. In the Islamic world, the glory and purity of the prophet Muhammad stands as the source of native authenticity; for the Muslims, history since Muhammad is understood to be a history of decline, and the idea of recovering a glorious and pure past becomes an important source of selfhood. In the late Arabist Albert Hourani's depiction, "With the full articulation of the message of Muhammad in a universal community obedient to divine command, what was significant in history came to an end."(3) In Japan, however, there is an absence of selfhood; there is no past to recover, no tradition to conserve. To be sure, the modern creation of the emperor myth in the late nineteenth century was an attempt at establishing authenticity, but the very amorphousness of the imperial institution then and now attests to the difficulty of fabricating a tradition to preserve the Japanese self in the modern context. Note that the dominant counter to the West in Japanese thought is not Japan but Asia, a concept that begs satisfactory definition. Japan, to borrow the imagery of French literary critic Roland Barthes, is an "empty center."(4)

In 1935, in the midst of Japan's rebellion against the Western international order, when the country ostensibly stood united behind the banner of emperorism, the philosopher Testuro Watsuji astutely and defiantly observed: everybody knows what the Japanese spirit (Nihon seishin) is, but once you question it, you begin to realize that nobody knows what it is.(5) Who are the Japanese? asks and answers social critic Shuichi Kato in a 1957 essay: the Japanese are a people who continuously and tirelessly ask, who are the Japanese?(6) Watsuji and Kato are two of the leading thinkers of twentieth-century Japan. The career of Watsuji, a conservative, spanned the pre-1945 imperial order and the postwar democratic transformation, while Kato, a liberal, has been a champion of postwar democracy. But while their political orientations differed, both agreed on the amorphousness of Japanese national identity. They had no alternative, for it was the essential quality of modern Japanese thought of which they were products.

The Obsession with the West

To become modern, using the West as a model, has been the core sentiment of Japanese thought. Every consideration of national identity, profound and trivial, has had to be formulated as a comparison between Japan and the West. Even the urge to reject the West and to establish Japan's distinctiveness necessarily has been framed in terms of the confrontation with the West. Therefore, any contribution to Japanese thought seemed to demand some knowledge of Western thought, however distorted and cursory.

Generally, Japanese thought has been articulated in categories that are assumed to be intelligible to Westerners. Thinking about national identity thus becomes the reification of a Western audience. In this way, Japanese thought has been the "work of translators."(7)