II 歴史と物語

伝統の発明

抄録

　Time flows from the past to the present. This time concept has prevailed in the modern world. But we perceive the past from the present and reproduce past events in our present framework, which we call development. Our time concept is trapped in the modern developmental idea. In this perspective history is a narrative of the modern world.
　Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger pointed in their Invention of Traditon that what people had believed as tradition was invented in the modern era. The members of "Invention of Tradition in Modern Japan" research group at Osaka University have apllied the concept to modern Japan and discovered that the Japanese inventions such as Judo, Sumo, Bonsai, hanko, wa, religion and provincial area are invented in Meiji era through early Showa era. Through these discoveries we try to approach how the modern Japan made traditions and how they spread as the Tradition. Our findings guide us to find how the modern narrative has obtained the myth making power.
　Our criticism to the modern myth making will finally throw light to our fundamental belief in the making of the modern. The problem we have to solve is not sociology of time but time in sociology.