Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View.

• Author: Walthall, Anne
• Position: Review

By S. N. EISENSTADT. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1996. Pp. xii + 581. $39.95.

Japan is a modern industrial nation-state that bears only a superficial resemblance to other modern industrial societies. Eisenstadt's goal is to explain less the factors that contributed to Japan's modernization than the reasons for its divergence from the first modernizers in the West. To this end he sets up an elaborate comparative framework and systematically analyzes Japanese politics, society, religion, and philosophy in their contemporary and historical setting. He seeks to avoid both the essentializing of Orientalism and Nihonjinron (the myth of Japanese uniqueness springing from some ineffable wellspring in the innate Japanese personality) and the "inverted Orientalism" of scholars who would explain transformations in Japanese history and society in terms of universal categories adopted from the West. What is the point, for example, in trying to apply a Marxist notion of class consciousness to a society in which, even today, class consciousness is notoriously weak? Instead, Eisenstadt argues that the course of Japanese history and contemporary Japan must be explained by a combination of structural factors, the development of cultural predispositions, and historical contingency.

The comparative focus is between "axial" civilizations, such as Europe (undifferentiated), India, and China, and Japan as a non-axial civilization. (An occasional nod is given to non-axial or pre-axial civilizations such as ancient Egypt.) Axial civilizations are characterized by the assumption that this world is not good enough; it must be made better by forcing it to approach a transcendental order. Such civilizations are identified with the ancient and great religions and philosophies - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the west, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism in the east. These see themselves as having universal applicability and in some cases there is a strong missionary component to bring other areas of the world under their civilizing umbrella through the power of the word (logocentrism). The Japanese people, in contrast, developed a much more strongly particularistic and this-worldly orientation. Notions of what it means to be Japanese are founded on natural sacral primordial myths centered on the emperor that are not to be fully expressed in words nor can they be generalized to other contexts. The interesting question then becomes: How did Japan manage to...