On Culture and Technology in Postmodern Japan

Tetsuo Najita

The rise of modern subjectivity and man-centered individualism is seen here not merely as an avoidable mistake, but as a phase in the course of human emancipation and maturation—though a phase whose intrinsic shortcomings have now become obvious.

—Fred R. Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity

I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence—to me the Orient is a matter of indifference.

—Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

Where will Japan take the postmodern retrospective perception that individualism was a "mistake," that the yearning for emancipation and freedom promised by humanist notions of subjectivity will not be satisfied? Dallmayr does not ask this question of Japan specifically, for he addresses himself to modernity in general and to a modernity as articulated within the framework of a theory of subjectivity and of knowledge identified with a humanist history since the Renaissance. Yet the relevance of Dallmayr's question for modern and postmodern Japan is clear. What is beyond, or what comes after, possessive individualism and radical subjectivity? Is it community at home, the Japanese ways of doing things, that provides the site and process of postmodern certitude? Can phenomenology identifiable with Husserl and Heidegger, and perhaps Sartre, frame an alternative intellectual orientation? If the intervening force after the "obvious" failings of subjectivity is social consciousness as articulated by Lukács (not as inevitable, but as reflexive human intervention), then where might the source of reflexivity be located? Dallmayr points his readers to the problematic of nature as alienated subject, and, further, to the complex discussions about the dialectical epistemology of subject and object that emerged out of the Frankfurt School. His assessment of our intellectual history beyond the "obvious," however, remains uncertain, not unlike the sense of the postmodern in Japan, where, similarly, we sense a profound uncertainty about what might lie beyond the "intrinsic shortcomings" of individualism and subjectivity.

In the second epigraph, Roland Barthes expresses skepticism regarding subjectivity in terms of cultural knowing. Since for Barthes subjectivity, either individual or cultural, aside from being a fabricated semiotic system, is actually only a myth, the Oriental Other quite logically is not knowable to him and therefore is a matter of "indifference." More importantly, Barthes's comment is about the Other as unknowable just as "we" (any "we") are unknowable to ourselves: hence the reflexive significance of admitting the limitation of cultural knowing, "until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the 'father tongue' vacillate." In his brilliantly laconic and at times annoying semiotic reading of contemporary Japan, Barthes reveals a radical and ironic skepticism that the Japanese have not been able to indulge, engaged as they have been in the relentless course of high-growth economics. What will cultural reflexivity mean to a Japan that can now afford its share of skepticism, and then some? Will it seek to "export" what it "knows" for certain about itself to observers who do not "understand" Japan? Will it mediate and manage its cultural knowledge through institutional channels not yet clear? Or perhaps, under the projected conditions of low-growth economics, the Japanese will admit, along with Barthes, that the "Occident" is a matter of indifference to them, not because self-known cultural essence is beautiful and true and knowable, but, consistent with Barthes's semiosis, because what might constitute Japanese culture as the basis of self-knowledge is also unknowable, changeful, never fixed, always an open text containing a "surplus of meaning," and hence never beyond doubt, and that, therefore, even the rights of the "father tongue" will always vacillate. In truth, as most of us are aware, the history of modern Japan reveals quite a different pattern in cultural epistemology, so as to make this Barthian possibility seem unlikely.

For Japan, the West as the resource of technological knowledge has hardly ever been an object of indifference, except in certain egregious instances when, driven by uncompromising patriotic and nativist impulses, society has retreated from its—technology'—hold. And culture as the resource for firm, unshakable self-knowledge has rarely been characterized as ultimately unknowable, certainly not since perhaps Dogen and the early phases of Zen Buddhism in the thirteenth century; on the contrary, culture has been thought to be perfectly knowable, understandable from within, not requiring translation—not even the mediations of "language" and other "signs." A matter of the human spirit—kokoro—cultural certitude broadly conceived in terms of various historical and aesthetic verifications has served to frame technology within what is known for sure. Cultural self-knowledge, in other words, must be firmly grasped as a prior condition if technology is to acquire proper grounding. Culture precedes and frames technology, informs its ideology, grants it power, and, alternatively, generates contests over its own meaning.

The postmodern condition in "post-postwar" Japan will probably involve a working out of the deep interplay between technology and culture, the historical and the universal, otherness and self. The presumption that culture, history, and self are knowable has already generated intense and sometimes polemical discussion, since claiming to know is not the same thing as convincing others of what that knowledge is. In this arena of debate, culture is defended as radical individual commitment (as in Mishima Yukio's "defense" of culture), or explicated in the social-scientific terms of a refined, irreducible, and distinct "structure" or basic "pattern" (as in Nakane Chie's "vertical" society and Doi Takeo's "dependency" theory of childrearing), or presented as ideal "form" (as in Kobayashi Hideo's work on Motoori Norinaga). Or, as we hear more regularly of late, culture is "managed" by an impersonal administration so that it might be contextualized for "proper" understanding. Rather than see an end or resolution to these interpretations, postmodern Japan will witness...