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

World Policy Journal, Summer, 1999 by Masaru Tamamoto

For Japan, as a non-Western latecomer to the process, the pursuit of modernity has involved, above all, a concern with the nation's status in an alien world. The purpose of technique has been to elevate Japan in world history by generally accepting the universalizing claim of the West and to find the meaning of Japan by imagining a cultural context of modernity. By dissociating culture from modernity, Japan could hope to become modern, that is, to parallel the achievements of the West, but not to be of the West.

Japan is often described by outside observers as goal-oriented, but the nature of Japanese goals is fundamentally incompatible with the transcendent nature of the Western Enlightenment. The Japanese are a people who ask "how," not "why." In the Japanese view, the why is antisocial and often creates embarrassing situations. Rikutsu is one Japanese word for reason; when used to describe a person, it means argumentative, not reasonable. To speak of truths and principles is frowned upon and little understood; at best, it is tolerated as the whim of ivory-tower intellectuals. There are always those who wish to inject higher ideals into what they see as a world of compromises. But the essence of society in Japan is compromise; it is a compromise among men and not of principles. Self-reflection marks and distinguishes the West's Enlightenment project, but reflexivity without reason is mere technique.

"He believed that remote ends were a dream, that faith in them was a fatal illusion; that to sacrifice the present...to distant ends must always lead to cruel and futile forms of human sacrifice. He believed that values were not found in an impersonal, objective realm, but were created by human beings, changed with the generations of men; that suffering was inescapable, and infallible knowledge neither attainable nor needed."(13) This description, which aptly fits Japanese sensibility, is how Isaiah Berlin portrayed the skepticism of the nineteenth-century Russian political thinker Alexander Herzen. Applying this description to Japan today, a very successful society by world standards, the virtues of Japanese flexibility are obvious.

At the same time, it describes a Japan without core values, a Japan that can move from liberal internationalism to militarism and imperialism, then to a politically isolationist economics - which is a rough description of the swings in Japan's orientation in the world during the twentieth century. Of course, one can readily identify countries within the Western Enlightenment tradition with similar historical experiences during the turbulent twentieth century. In a comparative evaluation of Western great powers, only the United States and Britain are arguably exempt. Still, what matters in a reflection on contemporary Japanese national identity is the fact that a large proportion of the Japanese intellectual class blame the country's paucity of core values and transcendent reason for these swings, and specifically for Japan's disaster in the Second World War.