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

World Policy Journal, Summer, 1999 by Masaru Tamamoto

Admittedly, this cultural approach to the clarification of national identity in Japanese thought is anything but new. It has been a distinct feature of Japanese thought since the mid-nineteenth century. One common cultural approach has been the study of poetry, which is bound by the particularity of language and essentially untranslatable. The cultural approach has aimed to establish Japanese distinctiveness, to locate sources of identity that are not comparable, and thus are free of value judgements in relation to others, yet as good as any other.

In one sense this is a healthy recognition of the plurality of cultures. But so long as the Japanese continued to consider their country as less than modern, the cultural approach could not satisfactorily tackle the question of modernity: if Japanese culture is as good as any other, the question ran, then why does Japan lag behind the West in wealth and power? In a Japan that was less than modern, this cultural approach was doomed to stand as a failed attempt to escape the burden of world history.

But in a modern Japan, an equal in the achievements of modernity, investigation of cultural pluralism begets new life. Japan has become modern, yet it is not the same as America. This simple truth has freed Japanese thought to reconsider culture not as an escape from world history but as an effort to forge a world history that is more cognizant and tolerant of cultural differences.

Who Are the Japanese?

The arrival at modernity brings with it another paradox. Because Japanese national identity had been largely understood as a comparison, in a world without models Japanese thought often loses its bearings. Thus, instead of forging an identity with universal and inclusive qualities, Japanese thinkers, in a Japan that has finally achieved the historical pursuit of modernity and approximated the West's claim to universality, nonetheless tend to retreat toward particularism. Without any comparative yardsticks with which to gauge their status in the world, they tend to retreat into notions of the singularity of the Japanese experience.

Who are the Japanese? Looking toward the twenty-first century, it seems clear that Japan's relations with Asia will play a critical role in forging a new national identity. Obviously, much of this will be due to the internationalization of economic activities in Asia. For Japan, whose dominant impulse for over a century had been to "escape Asia," to borrow the nineteenth-century Enlightenment thinker Fukuzawa's imagery, this will mean that the old question of equality is bound to resurface. Many of the problems Japan has experienced in Asia have been the result of the inequality of power between Japan and the rest of Asia's countries since the late nineteenth century. The history of the region, in this sense, has been one of Japanese domination and Asian rebellion. Even today, there is no regionalism akin to that of Europe, where Germany, France, Italy, and Britain hold relatively equal power. Asian regionalism is more like the North American free trade area, in which the United States dominates Canada and Mexico.