During the 1970's there has been a boom in the number of commentaries written about Japanese culture. But, this phenomenon is by no means new, as its roots can be traced back to the Meiji Restoration. In the intervening one hundred years from then up to now there has been a great deal of commentary on Japan, the Japanese people, and Japanese culture. During these hundred years the successive booms in commentary on Japanese culture have passed through seven stages. The first stage saw a spate of comments seeking to bring enlightenment (文明開化) to Japanese culture. in the 1870's. Aimed at the westernization of Japan, these critiques attacked quite harshly the excessive authoritarianism that ran throughout Japanese society. The second stage was the nationalistic stage of the 1890's, which re-evaluated truth, goodness, and beauty in traditional Japanese terms. The third stage came around 191O, and it recognized Japan to be a "one-family state" while also seeking to understand Japan from the viewpoints of "region," "people," and "everyday life" as in folklore and Okinawan studies. The fourth stage arose in the 1930's with the fascist concept of "returning to the essence of Japan" and with all sorts of theories that opposed this concept. The remaining three stages came after World War II, with the fifth stage of commentary on Japanese culture starting in the late 1940's and early 1950's. The world of journalism was as warm with articles about a modernistic understanding of Japan, and then later there came some other articles arguing for the impurity of Japanese culture. The sixth stage came in the 1960's with commentaries on Japanese modernization (these originated often in America) and the revival of the Japanese conception of a national polity. However, other studies sought to penetrate deeply into the traditions of the Japanese people. The most recent stage, that of the 1970's contains comments on the indulgence (甘さ) of the Japanese people and also opposing comments, based on the viewpoint of the outlying districts, which have now become popular. During the modern history of Japan the periods when a lively debate on Japanese culture existed were when the foreign impact on Japan was strong (stages one and five) and When popular movements subsided (stages two, three, four, six, and seven).
抄録全体を表示