Self, State, and Civil Society in Modern Japan

Abstract

With the publication of Maruyama Masao’s celebrated work on the absence of individuation in Japan, the question of the “individual” and Japan’s modernity moved from traditional anthropological treatment to the domain of Cultural Studies. From modernization theory’s concern with how a technologically sophisticated, industrially advanced country had succeeded in maintaining putatively “traditional” mores of group identity and collectivism to the detriment of individuation, recent scholarship has been vexed by the question of whether personhood in Japan must be understood within the context of post-modernity, or a post-modernity that is also pre-modern. Has Japan circumvented the pitfalls of modernity, including its central tension of reconciling individuated ends with the social good by bypassing it altogether? Is its economic prowess and rampant consumerism an anachronistic result of its continued reliance on “traditional” forms of social life, including hierarchy, kinship, and status? Or is it suggestive of an internally riven society in which dissent, pluralism, democracy, and, most crucially, individuation have been putatively sacrificed at the altar of economic success?