Paper short abstract:

My paper tries to provide a comparative and interdisciplinary approach for interpreting the Japanese process of forming modern collective (national) identity based on premodern cultural concepts of identity, comparing this pattern with global (Asian, Western and Central European) development issues.

Paper long abstract:

Several scholarly works on Japan explain the specific phenomena of the 19th century Japanese modernization in terms of Japanese tradition and culture. The process of Meiji modernisation followed the European developmental pattern, but the basement (Japanese cultural traditions) on which it was built had been made in the Edo period. Kokugaku of the Edo period can be seen as a key factor of defining cultural identity in the 18th and early 19th century based on Japanese cultural heritage. Kokugaku focused on Japanese classics, on exploring, studying and reviving (or even inventing) ancient Japanese language, literature, myths, history and also political ideology.

Meiji scholars used kokugaku conceptions of Japan to construct a modern nationalism that was not simply derived from Western models and was not purely instrumental, but made good use of early modern and culturalist conceptions of community, that the kokugaku scholars sought to research, analyse and promulgate among the broader population.

The role of pre-modern cultural identity in forming modern Japanese (national) identity - following mainly Miroslav Hroch's comparative and interdisciplinary theory of national development - can be examined compared to the "national awakening" movements of the peoples of East Central Europe. In the shadow of a cultural and/or political "monolith" (China for Japan and Germany for Central Europe), before modernity, ethnic groups or communities started to evolve their own identities with cultural movements focusing on their own language and culture, which played crucial roles in their modernisation, too.

This Meiji-period Japanese pattern of economic, political, and cultural modernity was the result of a distinct cultural program closely related to some of the basic features of the Japanese historical experience, which - similarly to various Eastern European and Asian societies - developed as a continual response to the threatening military, economic, and technological superiority of the West, with its cultural and ideological program. With "reconstructing tradition", Japan could accomplish modernization while seemingly preserving its traditions, thus could solve the dilemma of almost every non-Western country: changing its cultural horizon without losing its identity.