The Anti-Modernist Backlash: Constructing Meiji Tradition

Abstract

It was almost inevitable that there would be a ‘counter-reaction’ against the excessive and uncritical ‘West-worship’ of the early Meiji period. There were bound to be heirs to the xenophobic samurai of the 1850s and ’60s as well as to modernists such as Fukuzawa. Some of the earliest Meiji forms of anti-modernism or anti-Westernism took rather quaint and somewhat comical forms, similar to the Luddites’ attacks on machines in early industrial England. For instance, there were samurai groups who refused to walk under telegraph lines for fear they would somehow be spiritually polluted by the electric current¹; or the Buddhist priest Sada Kaiseki, who wrote a famous polemic, ‘Lamps and the Ruination of the State’ (Rampu bokokuron, early 1880s), advocating the boycott of Western goods such as oil lamps (albeit, like the Luddites, with a serious economic purpose: the protection of traditional trades and industries).