Book Review SectionREVIEW ESSAYS

Japan's Alternative Modernity in a GlobalizingWorldGORDON MATHEWSThe Chinese University of Hong Kong

Japan and Its Others: Globalization, Difference, andthe Critique of Modernity. John Clammer. Japanese Soci-ety Series. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001. 272 pp.

Individual Dignity in Modern Japanese Thought: TheEvolution of the Concept of Jinkaku in Moral and Edu-cational Discourse. Kyoko Inoue. Ann Arbor: Center forJapanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001. 262 pp.

Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysisof Nihonjinron. Harumi Befu. Japanese Society Series.Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001. 181 pp.

A key topic of contemporary anthropology has been "theindigenization of modernity" (Hannerz 1996; Sahlins 1994):the processes through which a once supposedly universalmodernity are rendered culturally specific in different so-cieties. Japan, as the first non-Western society to modern-ize (and, perhaps, postmodernize), and even now the mostsuccessful, should thus be of prime anthropological inter-est. Yet, to the frustration of many anthropologists study-ing Japan, the society has by and large remained on theanthropological periphery, Ruth Benedict notwithstand-ing. Two of the three books under review in this essay at-tempt to make the anthropological study of Japan of interestto anthropologists at large. In this, they are only partiallysuccessful, but their endeavor is nonetheless important inattempting to make Japan not at the anthropological peri-phery, but close to its center, as, perhaps, today it should be.

Harumi Befu's Hegemony of Homogeneity is, as its subti-tle indicates, "an anthropological analysis of Nihonjinron,"theories of Japanese identity that seek "to establish Japan'suniqueness and to differentiate Japan from other cultures"(p. 2), particularly "the West," and, more particularly, theUnited States. Nihonjinron has been the subject of an ex-traordinarily vast outpouring of writing in Japan over thepast 50 years, both popular and scholarly. Befu's book isan effort to explicate the underlying logic and reasons for

this outpouring of writings on "Japaneseness," and in thisprocess

help bring Nihonjinron out of the Japanological closetand into the anthropological parlor for general debatewith those who are not necessarily interested in Japan butwho share a theoretical interest in ethnic and nationalidentity, [pp. 13-14]

His approach is not to attack Nihonjinron for its intellectualshortcomings, as earlier scholars have done, but, rather, toanalyze it anthropologically: "Nihonjinron here is consid-ered a cultural phenomenon to be subject to anthropo-logical analysis, just like shamanism, kinship structure, orethnicity" (p. 13).

The arguments of Nihonjinron for Japanese unique-ness tend to be made on various grounds, from climate tosocial structure to language. These arguments have as theirquestionable underlying premise Japanese racial and cul-tural homogeneity, and the coterminousness of Japaneseland, people, culture, and language. The popular demandfor Nihonjinron is enormous: "Every Japanese has someview or idea about Japan and the Japanese" (p. 49). Whilesome of the Nihonjinron books have intellectual merit,these "constitute the tip of the pyramid—the lower thequality, the more numerous the publications" (p. 50). Ni-honjinron in its more popular manifestations should beregarded, Befu argues, as a consumer good, like "swim suits,shirts, and neckties" (p. 62): a consumer good devoted todispensing stereotypes of Japaneseness to a market eagerto consume such stereotypes. These stereotypes, notesBefu, do not describe how Japanese people are, but, rather,how they should be: Nihonjinron is not "a description ofbehavior" but "a model for behavior" (p. 79), a prescriptivemodel for how to be Japanese.

Nihonjinron has been so extraordinarily popular inJapan, Befu argues, because it has served as a substitute forthe nationalist symbols that were discredited after WorldWar II, and that remain controversial today. Markers ofthe nation such as the flag and the national anthem stilllie within the shadow of Japan's wartime past. Nihonjinronhas emerged to fill this symbolic vacuum, providing markersof ethnic/national identity untainted by the war—despite

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Book Review Essays 959

the fact that it is empirically dubious as a description of Ja-pan, and despite the fact that only a minority of Japaneseseem to adhere to its tenets.

One might say that Nihonjinron writers are the spiritualleaders of the postwar civil religion of Japan. They are theprint equivalents of street corner preachers giving theiridiosyncratic interpretations of the Bible on a soapbox,except that here "the Bible" is not a written scripture butan imaginary state of what Japan should be like. [p. 121]

Befu's concluding chapter places Nihonjinron withinthe context of the past several centuries of Japanese his-tory. This is important but curiously misplaced. Whybring this in only at the book's end? The book lacks a con-clusion but seems simply to end: an anticlimax to a highlyinteresting book. I have a number of quibbles with thebook. I would like Nihonjinron to have been more clearlyplaced in the context of broader theoretical debates aboutethnic and national identity: Benedict Anderson is brieflydiscussed, but Frederick Barth, Anthony D. Smith, ErnestGellner, and other theorists might also have been en-gaged, to place Nihonjinron in a more explicitly compara-tive perspective. More specifically, I would have liked Befuto have explored the last ten years of Nihonjinron, writtenduring an era of perceived Japanese economic and societaldecline. Befu writes that "the economic downturn sincethe early 1990s has dampened Japanese confidence tosome extent, but not enough to make a major modifica-tion in the nature of Nihonjinron" (p. 141). My ownperusings in Japanese bookstores have convinced me thatthere has indeed been a change. Very few Japanese authorstoday express pride in Japan and in "the Japanese system";more common are books with titles like The Sickness Called"Japanese" (Kawai 1999). Nonetheless, Befu's book is wellworth reading, in that it makes Nihonjinron, in its cul-tural essentialisms, the bete noire of so many anthropolo-gists of Japan, comprehensible to a larger anthropologicalaudience, explaining its prevalence in ways that are cul-turally sensitive and that make considerable sense. Cul-tural identity has become an increasingly important focusof anthropological investigation, paradoxically as culturaldifference itself becomes increasingly problematic. Forcomprehending the complexities of non-Western culturalidentity worldwide, surely the study of Nihonjinron is es-sential—for which Befu's short and accessible book is avery good place to start.

John Clammer's japan and Its Others explores, in teninterlocking essays, first Japan as an "other" in the global-izing world and then "others" within Japan. Clammer'sapproach is parallel to Befu's in seeking to explore "a pow-erful ideology of homogeneity and difference that servesto legitimize a whole range of social practices in Japan" (p.viii), but the book places the issue in a larger frame. UnlikeBefu, Clammer makes questions of modernity and post-modernity and their Japanese distinctions central to hisbook, thereby bringing the analysis to a higher theoreticalplane. But the reader may feel vertigo: Clammer's writingis full of long sentences of dizzying abstraction, with few

empirical examples. His essays touch on a very broadrange of interesting questions without ever fully address-ing them. Like Befu's book, but to a much greater extent,this is a collection of disparate papers that have not beentransformed into a fully coherent book. In contrast toBefu, Clammer's writing seems aligned with cultural stud-ies and partakes of much of the extravagant rhetoric ofthat genre. Despite these reservations, however, the bookdoes offer its revelations. There are passages in many chap-ters that are highly acute, even stunning in their intellec-tual insight, a few of which I quote below.

The book's first chapter asks the fundamental ques-tion of how we are "to make sense of a society which hasachieved economic and technological dominance equal orsuperior to most of the West, but which has done so by avery different route and without the sacrifice of its distinc-tive culture" (p. 8). Clammer argues that the tools of "uni-versal" social science may be inadequate for this task,since those tools are themselves from a particular Westerncultural background,1 and implies that comprehendingthe "deep grammar" of Japanese cultural epistemologyand, in a broader sense, the critical importance of "differ-ence" and its meanings in contemporary Japanese life,may provide a means for such understanding.

Chapters 2 through 5 of Japan and Its Others explorethe relation of Japan to globalization, (post)modernity,and (late) capitalism. The Japanese model, Clammer writes,has sought "development without alienation by retainingthe social nexus as the primary value" (p. 43):

the Japanese social project is . . . to create within a 'pure'society, one untrammeled by the pollutions of the widerworld; and to create without a world . . that shares Ja-pan's postwar discovery of pacifism and universal har-mony, [p. 44]

This, however, runs alongside Japanese ideological isola-tionism, and the belief that Japan is fundamentally impos-sible to emulate. It also is challenged by the problems thathave shaken Japan over the past decade (p. 51). Clammerdiscusses Nihonjinron in several of these chapters, andasks whether its more sophisticated manifestations repre-sent indigenous social science or simply ethnocentrism.He points out that

anthropologists, who are usually so in favor of privileginglocal knowledge, have mostly failed to extend this to theNihonjinron. While Azande witchcraft is still studied withreverence long after it has . . . disappeared as a living sys-tem, the contemporary local knowledge of the world'ssecond biggest economy . . is still ignored or regarded asa kind of academic joke. [p. 69]

However, I argue that Nihonjinron is criticized because itis not the knowledge of radical others (despite Clammer'soccasional arguments for such Japanese otherness) but,rather, of our fellow modern/postmodern selves, held to alargely common intellectual standard—although whetherthat standard is universal or represents American/Westernethnocentrism remains an open question. Clammer impliesthe latter view: Nihonjinron "may be read as an attempt

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to salvage Japan from the ravages of a 'universalist' historywhich proves on closer examination to be . . . a homoge-nizing and Westernizing one" (p. 97).

Chapters 6 through 10 turn to "others" within Japan.These chapters explore the challenge that migrant laborerspose to the myth of Japanese cultural homogeneity; theanthropology of development, and how the study of Japa-nese NGOs might lead to a substantial reformulation of itspremises; Japanese Christians, and their status as a Japa-nese ideological minority; Jews as parallel to the Japanese,in terms of "comparative victimology" (pp. 209-211), andas comparative "odd people out" of modernity; andShinto as offering "an alternative politics of nature" that islinked to a contemporary rethinking of the meanings ofanimism and also of modernity itself:

The Japanese project this century might be seen as thestruggle between those desiring to "overcome moder-nity" . . . through the enterprise of nationalistic statebuilding, and those who seek to overcome it through itssubversion: a modernity whose roots in nature are left un-cut, [p. 243]

Clammer's later chapters are more focused and easier toget through than his earlier chapters, but they generallydo not grapple with the fundamental questions of thebook's earlier chapters, which, however maddening, raisequestions that transcend the study of Japan alone. Clam-mer never fully addresses those questions regarding thenature of Japanese alternative modernity and postmoder-nity in a globalizing world, nor of the validity of Japanesesocial science within world structures of power/knowl-edge; he is better at asking questions than at answeringthem. Nonetheless, the questions themselves may makeClammer's book worth reading.

Kyoko lnoue, in Individual Dignity in Modern JapaneseThought, takes an approach to scholarship that is diametri-cally opposed to Clammer's. Rather than fly from topic totopic like a bee spreading pollen, lnoue is like a blood-hound, nose always very close to the ground. Her book isof the least relevance for most anthropologists, especiallythose who are not specialists of Japan, but it does providevaluable textual evidence for the more abstract argumentsof Clammer as well as Befu. The book analyzes at greatlength a single Japanese term, jinkaku, without discussionof such larger issues as Japanese cultural identity and vi-sions of alternative modernity, but any discussion of Ja-pan's identity and modernity requires grounding in thelinguistic evolution of specific terms such as that whichlnoue provides.

fin refers to "person" and kaku refers to "status/rank"(p. 4). The term jinkaku may be glossed as "moral charac-ter," but moral character based in hierarchy rather thanequality. Not everyone merits respect because of theirjinkaku, but only those of "high moral character." Inoue'sbook explores the shifting meanings of jinkaku from thelate 19th century to World War II and, most pivotally, inthe initial years of postwar Japan, up until the present.Jinkaku was most generally used in moral education in

schools, and much of Inoue's analysis is of school text-books. In the course of the century of Inoue's analysis,jinkaku shifted in its meaning, earlier referring to hierar-chical responsibility and later referring to individualrights. From the 1890s to the 1910s, the term was of im-portance in "defining the concept of a person in a rapidlychanging Japanese society," (p. 56): Its importance lay inits ability to combine, or at least cover up the contradic-tions of, hierarchy and equality within a single concept ofthe person. This emphasis continued, largely unabated, upuntil World War II. After the war's end, the American par-ticipants formulating Japan's new constitution misunder-stood the concept of jinkaku, assuming that it simply re-ferred to "individual dignity," without comprehending itshierarchical connotations (pp. 4, 79); following the Ameri-can occupation, Japanese educational authorities largelyreturned to their prewar ideas of jinkaku, sometimes awarebut often unaware of the tension between hierarchy andequality in contemporary conceptions of jinkaku (p. 174).By the late 1960s, jinkaku gave way in educational docu-ments to the term ningen, connoting individual freedomand human rights in a more egalitarian society (p. 162), andschool textbooks later followed suit. At present, jinkakuhas largely vanished as a term, but its legacy remains, lnoueimplies, in Japan's ongoing commitment to a democracythat is not individual but communitarian, in which indi-viduals are discouraged from asserting individual rightsthat go against consensus (pp. 229-230).

While Inoue's analysis is convincing in meticulouslydemonstrating the changing meanings of jinkaku, onelongs for more discussion of the larger social context inwhich these changes took place. Without such discussion,the underlying reasons why the meanings of jinkakushifted as they did, as well as the larger cultural signifi-cance of these changes, remains opaque, and the reader istempted to conclude that jinkaku does not matter verymuch. However, the term does matter. The changing mean-ings of jinkaku relate to Nihonjinron, and its insistent as-sertions of an essential unchanging group-oriented Japanin the face of all the evidence to the contrary, and, clearly,jinkaku relates to the question of Japan's "alternative mod-ernity," and whether it can remain alternative or rather isdoomed to be subsumed within a common universal orAmerican modernity/postmodernity.

Taken together, these three books offer complemen-tary views of the attempt to maintain Japanese culturaldistinction in the world. Befu's book provides an analysisand explanation of Japanese pundits' influential assertionsof homogenous and essential Japanese cultural identity,which many Japanese apparently do not fully believe, butconsume anyway, for lack of any believable cultural alter-native in the symbolic vacuum of postwar Japan. Clam-mer's book addresses the questions of whether there is analternative Japanese modernity, and an alternative cultur-ally specific Japanese social science, providing a groundingfor the rhetoric of Nihonjinron; these questions are crucialfor placing Nihonjinron and Befu's analysis in its largest

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context. Inoue's book offers an empirical analysis throughwhich the kinds of broad questions that Clammer asksmight begin to be empirically answered. Jinkaku can pro-vide a particular window into Befu's Nihonjinron, and theideological presentation of Japaneseness in the classroomover the past hundred years; and it can provide a particularwindow into Clammer's Japanese otherness, and, throughthe linguistic shifting of jinkaku, the molding of Japaneseothers into modern and postmodern selves. These threebooks are about Japan but transcend Japan, in asking indifferent, interrelated ways how much a distinct culturalidentity based in an alternative modernity is possible, andhow belief in such an alternative modernity might be sus-tained in today's globalizing world. Anthropologists study-ing parts of the world far from Japan might gain fromreading all three of these books.

NOTES1. Clammer's argument echoes those of Japanese anthropologistswho have challenged the hegemony of Western theoretical as-sumptions in the comprehension of Japan. See, for example, Ham-aguchi (1985) in his claim that Western social scientific modelsbased on individualism are simply inapplicable to Japan, which is asociety of interrelation. More recently, see Kuwayama (1997), in

his analysis of anthropological power relations: Japanese anthro-pologists who seek an audience beyond Japan must u inform to thedominant modes of anthropological discourse, those of the UnitedStates and Western Europe, and may thus be forced to alter notonly their modes of expression, but also their research and modesof investigation as well.

REFERENCES CITEDHamaguchi Eshun

1985 A Contextual Model of thejapanese: Toward a Methodologi-cal Innovation in Japan Studies. Journal of Japanese Studiesll(2):298-322.

Hannerz, Ulf1996 The Global Ecumene as a Landscape of Modernity. In Trans-

national Connections: Culture, People, Places. Pp. 44-55. Lon-don: Routledge.

Kawai Hayao2000 "Nihonjin"toiuyamai (The sickness called "Japanese"). To-

kyo: Ushio Shuppansha.Kuwayama Takami

1997 Genchi no jinruigakusha-naigai no Ninon kenkya o chnshinni (Native Anthropologists: With Special Reference to JapaneseStudies Inside and Outside Japan). Minzokugaku kenkyn (Japa-nese Journal of Ethnology) 61 (4):517-542.

Sahlins, Marshall1994 Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of

Modern World History. In Assessing Cultural Anthropology.Robert Borovosky, ed. Pp. 377-394. New York: McGraw Hill.

Memory and ViolenceJAMES PEACOCKUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s). T. Fujitani,Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds. Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2002. 472 pp.

Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in theTwentieth Century. Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas,eds. Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2001. 300 pp.

"Decayed thought" was, if I remember correctly, ThomasHobbes's dismissive characterization of memory. For thathard-headed philosopher, real thought was akin to ac-counting; you add up the facts and state a sum, unsulliedby sentiments that corrode memory and pollute goodthinking and good government. Why then has reflectionon memory emerged as a theme in the late 20th century?Have we lost our good sense and escaped into nostalgia? Oris critical thinking about memory a necessary piece of goodsense, especially about violence, war, and trauma?

One could draw a parallel between Zeitgeist at theclose of the 19th and the close of the 20th centuries; inboth periods many saw a focus on memory, at least in theWest, as a way of working through issues evoked by a timeof vigorous, violent trauma. Freud's Traumdeutung (Inter-pretation of Dreams) was published in 1900, following hisand Breuer's studies of hysteria and signaling the adventof psychoanalysis, which was based on recovering repressed(or traumatic) memory. Psychoanalysis followed archaeol-

ogy and Darwinian biology in focusing on the past,though not so much of the culture or species, but of theindividual: Uncover one's history to make the unconsciousconscious and free the ego to think and act rationally.

By mid-century, however, impetus had shifted frompast to present. Whether through structural-functionalismin anthropology and the social sciences or the variouskinds of therapies in psychology—family, transactional,cognitive, behavior modification—emphasis was now onhow the current system works. History, personal or collec-tive, was deemed secondary if not misleading—misleadingbecause it could only be fabrication. (I recall my first field-work, in the early sixties, when an Indonesian informantrecounted "history. I was impatient, barely noting whathe was saying because my job, I thought, was to see howthings worked, now.) By the eighties, into the nineties,and now in the new century, however, anthropology andother disciplines have refocused on memory. Examples arelegion, ranging from Borofsky's Making History- to Conner-ton's How Societies Remember. The books considered hereare substantial expressions of this wide interest.

The two volumes under review focus on a particularkind of memory, memory of traumatic history—violence,war, massacre, invasion, suffering, and death. Perilous Memo-ries is a collection of conference papers treating historiesinvolving Asia and the Pacific during the period surround-ing World War II. These are histories that have been mar-ginalized—suppressed or inadequately represented. Theyare perilous in that they arc in danger of being forgotten,