Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kevin M. Doak is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Chanpagne.

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Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity

University of California Press

The person who suspectsrightlythat domination is ever-present in art runs the risk of selling out to the approaching totalitarian tendencies, for he will be inclined to say to himself that things have always been this way and there is nothing he can do about it, forgetting that the illusion that art puts before us of an Other always implies the possibility of that Other, too.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

One of the most powerful and lasting contributions of the Japan Romantic School was its claim to cultural difference. As the acknowledged leader of the school, Yasuda Yojuro was unsurpassed in shaping a systemic view of Japanese culture and its role within the contradictions of an ostensibly homogeneous modern world. Remarkably sensitive to the problems of culture and its production, Yasuda remained firmly confident of the validity of the past in the present, of culture in an era of civilization, and of poetry in an increasingly prosaic world. Decadence was reason for hope, and failure "an ironic victory" for a man to whom Napoleon and the ancient Japanese emperor Gotoba were largely interchangeable. He was acutely aware of the necessity of a broad understanding of the major developments in European history as a precondition for any articulation of difference from it. And yet, in framing this production of cultural difference within the larger discourse on romanticism, Yasuda, it may be argued, had already intimated the ultimate futility of all attempts to "overcome" modernity.

The origins of the Romantic School's discourse on difference can be located in the perception of "a sense of ending" that pervaded

the brief Taisho era (191226).1   The Taisho years witnessed a renewed interest in problems of defining culture and identity, and Yasuda feared that the production of new cultural identities would be prematurely foreclosed by what he saw as the firm establishment of a complacent, managerial ethics. He found this trend particularly dangerous among university students, especially those in the humanities, whose employment prospects were extremely limited and who were forced to compete for what few openings existed in business and government. For Yasuda, the single-minded pursuit of personal wealth was a perversion of the Meiji tenets of "enriching the country and strengthening the army" (fukoku kyohei ). Students, he notes, "were disciplined down to their bone marrow with a smug, home-managerial national ethics."2   These students were seen as having lost the revolutionary zeal characteristic of the early Meiji years, which had set Japan apart from the rest of Asia, and as having traded in their Asian heritage for the material accouterments of the modern West. The solution was a more humanistic education that would restore meaningfulness to life by moving away from values based on individualism or economic gain. Yasuda's critique of Taisho education is remarkably close to Anthony Smith's insight that

education . . . for historicist intellectuals . . . represents something even more than a scientific temper and rationalist outlook. True education is a process of self-fulfillment through self-understanding; and such a process is inevitably a collective or rather communal and historical project. It is a process by which the individual comes to realise his role in the particular historic culture in which he has been brought up, and simultaneously to understand the history and destiny of the community to which his fate is linked.3

Thus, the central concern for intellectuals in the Showa period (192689), Yasuda argues, must be to compensate for this educational failure by producing new cultural forms that will resurrect the ideal of public-mindedness among intelligent and ambitious youth.

In spite of Yasuda's scorn for the excesses of material consumption, he harbored no doubts as to the finality of Japan's modernization. He firmly believed that much of modern culture had finally become accessible to the majority of Japanese during the

years of Taisho individualism. But modernity had also become an "ironic victory" for Japan at this juncture. Having achieved unparalleled success in technological and economic development, the Japanese faced the unprecedented problem of assimilating these developments into a new cultural logic that could encompass aspects of both East and West, self and Other. Yasuda was not optimistic about the possibility of such a new, syncretic culture. He understood that the introduction of foreign culture into Japan was irreversible and, more important, had brought with it the loss of Japanese traditions. He agreed with Hagiwara Sakutaro that modern Japan had lost everything but, unlike Hagiwara, he sought to go beyond a mere lamenting of the past to a theory of action, perhaps even a new culture, based on lamentation.

Given Yasuda's reading of the effects of modernity on Japanese culture, it should come as no surprise that he rejected any overt appeal to politics as the basis for a theory of action. In delineating the outlines of his own theory of action in "The Problem of Criticism" (1933), Yasuda agreed in part with Nakano Shigeharu's refutation of the modernist Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke's ideology of fusing politics and art into a new aesthetics of action.4   Both Nakano and Yasuda, for different reasons, sought to maintain the distinction between the two as separate, if equal, fields of inquiry. But for Yasuda, the separation could only be, at best, a "contradictory synthesis": "The problem may be expressed as a contradictory synthesis of artistic value and political value. The problem may also be framed within the context of the limits of criticism and acceptance. These contradictory valuesto speak bluntlythe former may be called a universal value, and the later might be termed a particular, or historical, value."5   Critical action, then, required an intervention in this "contradictory synthesis" to preserve the possibility of any significant change. Whereas Nakano sought to deny political value to art, Yasuda believed political action possible only within the contradictions of a culturally based art of universal proportions.

By early 1934 Yasuda began to refer to these contradictions as "irony." In an essay on the tragic German poet Friedrich Hlderlin, Yasuda argues that it was Kant's Third Critique that undermined our faith in reason and modernity. Kant openly confessed the failure of his method to establish the relationship of man

to nature and God, and thereby gave a candid admission of the failure of reason. In the aftermath of the failure of reason, "pure poets," such as Hlderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche, who refused to recognize the separation between art and life were able to survive only at the expense of their sanity. However, with the establishment of a capitalist society, livelihood became the supreme concern and was regulated through a system of formal laws. Within capitalist society, where reason prevailed, all change and forms of social difference were underwritten by the irony of "the...