Japan's Making of ‘Western Society' without Democratic Social Foundations: A Historical Analysis of the Meiji Era and Beyond, 1850s-1900s

This paper provides a sociology-of-knowledge style inquiry into the process and consequence of prewar Japan’s major national project: the making of ‘western society’ in Japan. My claim is that intellectuals and policy-makers, in order to actualize the idealized ‘western society’ in Japan, heightened hostility toward people’s native, traditional forms and notions of society, and denied a possibility that Japan’s ‘westernization’ was accommodated by people’s traditionally democratic awareness. For this reason, prewar Japan’s promotion of ‘western society’ necessarily lacked social foundations of democracy. This problem, I conclude, ironically supported the prewar reactionary movement, and even led to a negation of the promoted ‘west’ by the totalitarian regime.

 For one thing, eminent intellectuals existed who advocated the modernization of Japan in the Meiji era, and introduced the western conceptualization of ‘society’ by referring, most importantly, to J. S. Mill. It was an attempt to deny Japanese native forms of society and replace them with western types, on the ground that Japanese society had no internal capacity to nurture democracy and the ‘individual,’ which were thought to be the key for modernization. Based on such understandings, harsh policies were imposed to ban people’s participation into indigenous forms of socialization.

 For another, undoubtedly, some patterns of Japanese society were far more progressive than what modernists assumed. One type of such traditional social formations was what was called ‘kou.’ Being originated in the Buddhist beliefs, ‘kou’ gathered small merchants and peasants in city and countryside, providing them with means of daily-association and mutual-financing. In many ways, ‘kou’ had non-feudalistic, non-patriarchal, and democratic bases, on which people voluntarily socialized outside of narrower social-determination by birth, kinship, and territorial bonds, even free from the feudal status system. Had modernists stopped banning it, ‘kou’ might have democratized Japanese ‘western society’ of Japan from below.