The ‘Overcoming Modernity' Symposium: Modernity, Japan and East Asia

The paper aims to address the theme of the session by using the ‘Overcoming Modernity’ symposium that took place in Japan in 1942. The symposium has conventionally been dismissed as ‘infamous’ or even ‘notorious’, not deserving serious attention, and was predominantly viewed that it was an attempt by the intellectuals of the day to legitimise the war and fascism. While the symposium’s position as part of wartime propaganda is not denied, its contribution to Japanese political and cultural thought has been sporadically re-examined starting with Takeuchi Yoshimi’s essay published in 1959.  Takeuchi (1959=1979) dismissed the symposium as intellectually empty but argued that the event represented a historical moment when various contradicting forces in Japan, such as restoration vs innovation, the East vs the West and so on, came into a violent collision as an attempt at ‘overcoming modernity’. He appreciated the intellectuals’ concern with ‘overcoming modernity’ as a worthy endeavour as an exercise to look for solutions to the perceived social, economic and political ills but concluded the symposium failed to contribute to the development of political and cultural thoughts in Japan because of the intellectuals’ failure to recognise the double-sided nature of the Pacific War (as an anti-imperialism war against the hegemonic West and as an imperialist and colonialist war towards Asian countries) in their attempts to understand the world. The paper examines the visions of modernity that the symposium participants sought to overcome and explores the ideas suggested as alternatives to the Western-centric vision of modernity during the symposium. These alternatives were then placed in the background of competing visions of Asia and the world including pan-Asianism, the East Asia Cooperative Community and oriental religiosity.