'Japan' tag archive

It has been long forgotten, since Japanʼs defeat and the loss of its empire, that during the Asia–Pacific war (1931–45) a large number of scholars, journalists and bureaucrats were eagerly engaged in academic and public discussions of racism and colonialism. In contrast to the overall poverty of the critique of racism and ethnic nationalism in […]

Out of Japan The New Associationist Movement Harry harootunian If the news from Japan during the last decade has concentrated on the depressing symptoms of decline of what once had been hailed as a miracle model of capitalist development, the announcement last year of the establishment of the New Associationist Movement in Osaka and Tokyo […]

One of the rarely noticed historical ironies of the twentieth century was the effort of societies located on the capitalist periphery – outside of Euro-America – to resort to a philosophy which had no place for them in order to explain their entry into and experience of capitalist modernization. Japan led the way in this […]

Imaginative mislocation Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome, ground zero of the twentieth century Matthew charles The average Westerner … was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields. Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906The controversy […]