The Symposium on Overcoming Modernity and Discourse in Wartime Japan

Tokyo in 1942 has been much commented upon, but later critics have tended to over-emphasize the wartime political context and the ideological connection to Japanese ultra-nationalism.
Closer examination shows that the background and the actual content of the discussion were
more complicated. The idea of overcoming modernity had already appeared in debates among
Japanese intellectuals before the war, and was always open to different interpretations; it could
indicate Japanese ambitions to move beyond Western paradigms of modernity, but in other
cases it referred to more radical visions of alternatives to modernity as such. Some versions
linked up with Western critiques of existing modernity, including traditionalist as well as more
future-oriented ones. These differentiations are evident in the symposium, and associated with
diverse schools of thought. An important input came from representatives of the Kyoto school,
the most distinctive current in twentieth-century Japanese philosophy. Despite the suppression
of Marxist thought, the background influence of the unorthodox Marxist thinker Miki Kiyoshi
was significant. Another major contribution came from the group known as the Japan Romantic School, active in literature and literary criticism. Other intellectuals of widely varying persuasions, from outspoken nationalists to Catholic theologians, also participated. The result was
a rich but also thoroughly inconclusive discussion, from which no consensus on roads beyond
modernity could emerge.