Overcoming Modernity
Topic: Paths to Modernisation: Japan, China, Korea · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 7 "Paths to Modernisation"
Meaning
"Overcoming Modernity" was a famous wartime symposium in Japan. It was held in 1942, though NCERT gives the date as 1943. Thinkers asked how Japan could be modern and still fight the West. Their idea was that Japan could rise above a "modern" world that the West had shaped. The symposium shows how intellectuals gave support to Japan's wartime nationalism.
Example
The philosopher Nishitani Keiji said the "modern" was made of three Western things: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the natural sciences. He argued that Japan's "moral energy", a phrase borrowed from the historian Ranke, gave it the duty to build a Greater East Asia. At the same meeting, the composer Moroi Saburo wanted music to become once more an art of the spirit.
Don't confuse with
- Fukuzawa Yukichi's "expel Asia": Fukuzawa wanted Japan to adopt Western civilisation. The 1942 symposium wanted Japan to move beyond the West and lead Asia.
Related concepts
- First Sino-Japanese War
- Russo-Japanese War
- Japanese aggressive nationalism
- Manchurian Incident 1931
- Nanjing Massacre 1937