Modern Japan and Multiple Modernities

inherited from axial traditions, changes resulting from the emergence of modern society and its
radically innovative normative turn. To put it another way, the question relates to modern discursive reworkings of path-dependent figures of thought. In the context of such processes, discourses
on identity intertwine with more or less critically oriented discourses on culture and society. For
non-European countries, and very emphatically for Japan, Northwestern Europe is an almost
exclusive domain of reference, notwithstanding eventual condemnations of European “decadence”
or – as the case may be – capitalist contradictions. But when some critical distance from Europe is
achieved, it combines easily with returns to a supposedly primordial native legacy, even with the
illusory belief that this legacy can inspire a transformative creation of something new in human
history. Such intellectual phenomena occur, with significant variations, across a broad political
spectrum. This essay discusses a few exemplary Japanese cases