Formation of the Japanese Nation

Abstract

In the modern era major transformations of an economic and political nature have largely taken place within the confines of what is termed the nation-state. Visions of a new order transcending national barriers ultimately proved to be chimeric. Pan-Islam, Pan-Asianism, Pan-Africanism were dreams, hardly realities. The internationalism of Trotsky was abandoned in favour of the nationalism of Stalin. Nationalism has been one of the major historical forces in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ‘ism’, however, can only be derived from a reasonably widespread acceptance on the part of the inhabitants of any given territory of what constitutes the nation: are there a sufficient number of ingredients, and are they sufficiently strong, to make the people believe that they are bound together in solidarity, that together they constitute a national identity, and that the symbol of that identity is worthy of their allegiance? For nationalism to exist, there must be a nation; for the nation to exist, the population must acquire a national consciousness.