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

World Policy Journal, Summer, 1999 by Masaru Tamamoto

Superior West, Inferior Japan

There is no future, one of the contributors to Minami's study argues, in Japan strengthening its national egoism (read the emperor system). The author is a Japanese Christian, who asserts that as the Christian spirit respects human rights it is the necessary antidote to Japan's national egoism.(11) As those familiar with Japanese intellectual history will recognize, this is the kind of argument that could have appeared at any time in the chronology of modern Japanese thought, one that contrasts a "superior" Western idea to an "inferior" Japanese quality, and prods Japan to change its habit of mind.

The self-criticism that had become the dominant mode of Japanese thought rose to new heights after the disaster of the Second World War. Its record has been mixed. On the one hand, the approach served as a tonic for national self-improvement and encouraged Japan's achievements in modernity. On the other hand, with its incessant harping on Japan's inadequacies and its suspicion of native qualities, Japanese thought, whose task ostensibly is to establish a national identity, only helped perpetuate Japanese ambiguity.

Today, there is a significant gap between Japan's intellectual ambiguity on the one hand, and its social achievements and economic power in the world on the other. This has created a gulf between Japanese thought and the assumptions of society. Perhaps this is why Oe's depiction of Japan as the world's periphery struck many Japanese as a curious utterance. For Japanese society no longer recognizes the West as a model. The one constant in the turbulent history of modernizing Japan was the assumption that the world would continue to provide models from which it could pick and choose.

But once Japan became fully modern, things changed. The West began to look toward Japanese thought and literature as well as toward its management and manufacturing techniques. And even Oe admits that Japanese writers are no longer isolated; this admission came after his receipt of the Nobel Prize. When, in 1968, Kawabata became the first Japanese recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, Japan, still mindful of Western recognition, stood jubilant; it was a moment of national celebration and honor. By 1994, Japan was no longer in need of such national recognition; Oe's honor was more personal and less national. In this can be read the final chapter of Japanese thought as it had been constituted for 120 years.

Modernity as Technique over Reason

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another."(12) Immanuel Kant's definition of the Enlightenment project has framed Western thought. The West's modernization was propelled by efforts to implement ideas about progress and reason, and was characterized by universalizing and rationalizing impulses. While, with the passage of time, reason tended to disappear into technique in the West, in Japan, modernity has always been about technique.