Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. viii, 372 pp. US$35.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-231-19021-3.
Harry Harootunian (b. 1929) does not technically belong to what is often referred to as the “founding generation” of Japanese studies scholars, who trained in wartime military language academies and helped to rebuild the defeated nation during the US occupation. Yet his influence over the field has been no less profound. Since the appearance of his first monograph, Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan (Princeton University Press, 1970), he has dominated the landscape of Japanese intellectual history. His most recent publication, a collection of his own previously published essays (mostly from the 1990s and 2000s) entitled Uneven Moments: Reflections on Japan’s Modern History, provides a sense of the diverse problems and commitments that have engaged him throughout his long career.
The volume takes its title from Harootunian’s theorization of the relationship between politics and culture. Following Gramsci, he sees the two as inevitably destined for revolutionary incompatibility (“unevenness”), with the former ever more constrained by shrinking possibilities, the latter ceaselessly productive of novel forms, and each “either too broad or too excessive” from the perspective of the other (2). Unevenness is also found in the imbrication of past and present, history and memory, reflected through case studies of specific “moments” from the history of eighteenth-century through contemporary Japan. The selection of moments is governed by Harootunian’s abiding preoccupation with the everyday: not the geopolitically significant interactions of nation-states and those who act on their behalf that are often thought to constitute “history,” but “the repetitive routines and a scarcity of events, whose rhythms remain unassimilated to the national form” (3).
The dozen essays featured in Uneven Moments are divided into four parts. Part I consists of two post-2000 essays offering a critique of area studies. (The republication of these pieces is particularly timely given contemporary debates over “the death of Japan studies.”) Part II, also composed of two essays, looks at culture and politics in early modern Japan (the author’s original research focus). Part III, the longest section in the book, is entitled “Pathways to Modernity’s Present and the Enduring Everyday.” The six essays grouped together here cover topics ranging from the scholarship of Hani Gorō (1901–1983), described by Harootunian as “the most gifted practitioner of a Marxian intellectual and cultural history before and after the war” (16), to the history and memory of the 2011 “triple disaster” in Fukushima.
The final section of the volume, “Ideological Formation: Colluding with the Past,” juxtaposes the oldest essay in the book, dating from 1988, with its only previously unpublished piece (aside from the introduction). “Visible Discourses/Invisible Ideologies” discusses Japanese intellectuals’ attempt to render the phenomenon of modern mass culture, devised by and imported from the West, into an authentically Japanese (national) construction purged of its negative associations with materialism and consumerism. Harootunian subsequently published a full-length treatment of this topic in perhaps his most influential work, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton University Press, 2000). The final essay, “The Presence of Archaism/The Persistence of Fascism,” explores the ways in which the government of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō (2006–2007 and 2012–) recalls some of the political trends of early twentieth-century Japan. The relationship between capital and fascism, Harootunian argues, has never disappeared, but rather evolved and strengthened in our time—a “silhouette of repetition” (327), in his beautiful phrase. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the occupying United States attempted to replace militarism and imperialism with a new ideology of democratic freedom, capitalist expansion, and peace. These values, the author provocatively suggests, characterized the era typically designated by historians as “postwar.” Now, however, the postwar period may be ending, as Abe seeks to sweep aside the American legacy in favour of neo-emperorism, gangsterism, and ultranationalist Shintō.
Beyond the rich ideas it juxtaposes and synthesizes, the pleasure of Uneven Moments lies in its candour. Harootunian has famously never dissembled his intellectual convictions. His sharpest critique targets academia and its constituent formations. He describes the University of Chicago (where he taught for many years) and its peer institutions today as “holding pens for the children of the rich and famous, indebted students, and professional administrators who see themselves as managers pitted against the labouring classes of teachers, principally dedicated to disciplining them” (13). Area studies and modernization theory are “dinosaurs in an intellectual Jurassic Park, where creatures with large bodies and small brains are on display” (24). The Social Science Research Council, a primary source of support for area studies scholarship, is described as “pimping” for funders; its retreat from a classic vision of area studies, “like Hegel’s owl … is always too late” (27). Asian studies is a simulacrum; the Association for Asian Studies (to which the bulk of Harootunian’s readers presumably belong) is both lifeless and arrogant, privileging arcane topics at the expense of self-reflection and self-critique (22–23).
Like Harootunian’s many other works, Uneven Moments is undoubtedly destined to provoke lively debate and to inspire a large following both among and beyond the ranks of history and Japanese studies scholars.
Miriam Kingsberg Kadia
University of Colorado, Boulder