Tag: Overcoming modernity

American Films in Japan: A Dilemma for ‘Overcoming Modernity’

Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941, leading Japanese academics and writers assembled at a round table to discuss the topic of “Overcoming Modernity”. This symposium demonstrates the daunting, improbable, and often paradoxical attempts to counter and move beyond Westernization to retrieve the lost Japanese cultural identity. However, these discussions occurred when Western culture, values, and technology were firmly entrenched in Japanese society, long after the Meiji era’s Bunmei Kaika (Civilization and Enlightenment) policy ‘modernized’ the nation.1

On day 2 of the discussions, the scholars criticize the Americanization of Japan through film. The global cultural power of the United States’ cinema industry reveals the complex and paradoxical nature of overcoming modernity: The symposia rejects film as a Western technology that has corrupted their culture, while also advocating for film in Japan to foster a return to tradition or ‘True Japanese Identity’.

The roundtable suggests that Western technology, like the camera and film, has corrupted Japanese culture and identity. Nishitani, a prominent Kyoto school member, opens the discussion by calling on Tsemura, a well-known film critic. Tsemura views Japan as a superior culture, lamenting the popularity of ignorant, low-brow American media. He detests the Western “machine society” that values quantity over quality and suggests the lack of historical tradition and multiracial makeup in the US as a reason for its films’ “global universality.”2 Tsemura views Americanization and Western technology as a poison to their traditional culture.

In the symposia there is a conservative desire to return to an idyllic, pure Japanese origin. The panelists suggest this can be accomplished through the spread of traditional representations, like the Japanese classics.3. However, the symposia acknowledges that the classics are unappealing to Japan’s young generation – the same “modern boys” and “modern girls” shaped by their appeal to the “optimism, speed, and eroticism” of American cinema.4 American film’s widespread appeal and the public’s general disinterest in the classics represent a core dilemma for the roundtable.

Recognizing the need to overcome the spread of Americanization through the medium of film, Tsumura surprisingly suggests that film could be adapted to instill the Japanese spirit.  Tsumura cites the Newsreels on the Greater East Asian War and its use in medical schools as evidence of the educational importance of film for Japanese society.5 He argues that film cannot be rejected because it emerged from the US; Like many technologies, it is ubiquitous and embedded into everyday life – “undeniable”.6 Instead, film must be adapted to promote a “higher culture” in Japan.7 Thus, to return culture to its idyllic past, away from the poisonous influence of the West, Japan must use a popular Western technology (film) to instill a traditional, ‘True Japanese Identity’ in modern boys and girls.

This, of course, is paradoxical; However, it does reveal the complexity of the roundtable’s dilemma. For the Kyoto School, ‘Overcoming Modernity’ was accomplished through “passing through modernity” – neither turning back to an idyllic past nor embracing Westernization, but moving forward by embracing both.8 Cinema represents one Western medium that the panel both rejects and embraces to overcome modernity. However, living through a time of ‘world-historical importance’ at the opening of World War 2, the symposium offers no clear solution to Japan’s predicament.

 

  1. Calichman, Richard. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan. (New York: Columbia Press, 2008), p.8 [↩]
  2. Calichman, Richard. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan. (New York: Columbia Press, 2008), p.201 [↩]
  3. Calichman, Richard. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan. (New York: Columbia Press, 2008), p.200  [↩]
  4. ibid  [↩]
  5. Calichman, Richard. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan. (New York: Columbia Press, 2008), p.202 [↩]
  6. Calichman, Richard. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan. (New York: Columbia Press, 2008), p.203 [↩]
  7. Calichman, Richard. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan. (New York: Columbia Press, 2008), p.203 [↩]
  8. Davis, Bret W. “The Kyoto School.” Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/. [↩]