Kushner Barak, Muminov Sherzod (ed.) Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding

Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2020. — 265 p. — ISBN: 978-1-3501-2706-7In May 1942, as the Japanese troops took the Philippines and Burma by overpowering the Allies in the whirlwind battles of the Pacific War, three Japanese critics—Kamei Katsuichirō, Kawakami Tetsutarō, and Kobayashi Hideo—invited a group of leading thinkers to a symposium with a grand mission. Their goal, broadly defined, was to discuss Japan’s struggles with the modern world. Ten eminent scholars, scientists, composers, and thinkers accepted the invitation, and the symposium, ambitiously titled Overcoming Modernity (Kindai no chōkoku), opened in the sweltering Tokyo of late July 1942.1 Over two days of lively debates, the participants discussed such diverse issues as the clash between modernity and tradition, religion and spirituality, the need for imperial loyalty, Japan’s place vis-à-vis the West and its responsibility to take on the cultural leadership of Asia. The discussions also had a practical side, perhaps best summarized by the philosopher Shimomura Toratarō, “to criticize what, how, and how much we have received from the modern West,” and what to make of these lessons in the new order that was dawning on Asia under Japan’s tutelage.2 The participants clearly equated “modernity” with the West; “what is called ‘modern,’” wrote the Kyoto School philosopher Nishitani Keiji, “means European.”3 Time was ripe for Japan’s intellectual elite, represented by symposium participants, to decide what of Western culture to abandon and what to keep for the service of the empire. The time had come to overcome the West not only on battlefields but also in people’s minds.
There was a contradiction hidden in how dispassionately many participants separated Japan from the West. In their criticism of the latter the discussants