An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931-1945.
An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931-1945.
复制标题
日本战时思想史，1931-1945 年。
DOI：
10.2307/2057041
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发表时间：
1986
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
S. Tsurumi
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
N. Tomita;S. Tsurumi
Memory made tangible in the form of culture continually retranslates a nation's experience, as Tsurumi Shunsuke has shown his Japanese audience for more than thirty years. These two works, originally lectures given in 1979-80, offer glimpses into the intellectual, cultural, and popular cultural life of modern Japan documented in his idiosyncratic oeuvre. In 1942 Tsurumi reentered Japan as an outsider returned from study at Harvard at age twenty. This time away may have given him the distance allowing for an engagement with contemporary culture: in 1946, along with his sister Tsurumi Kazuko, Maruyama Masao, Minami Hiroshi, and other intellectuals, he launched Shiso no kagaku, an iconoclastic journal of ideas and attitudes. Since that time there has been no grand historical schema directing Tsurumi's avowedly syncretic analysis. Because he works from the phenomenological assumptions of such Western pragmatists as William James while assuming the populist prejudices of the Japanese folklorists Yanagita Kunio and Origuchi Shinobu, his approach begs categorization. And although there is a political edge to his cultural critique, he adopts neither of the positions of the Western historians of mass culture: he does not speak as an elitist decrying an absence of high culture, nor does he celebrate a Utopian strain in mass culture that can liberate popular consciousness from the effects of colonization. Instead, these two books reveal one underlying irony directing both this historian's treatment of wartime life and his interpretation of postwar popular culture: Tsurumi Shunsuke aims to de-exoticize the everyday practices and beliefs of the people of Japan by romanticizing the mentality of the Japanese masses. An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (SenjikiNihon noseishinshi [Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982]) ranges over such topics as the literature about the Korean experience in twentieth-century Japan, the wartime strategy of the state leadership (which Tsurumi considers both militarist and fascist), and the counter-strategies of such figures as the housewife and the leader of the Christian Watchtower Society. The unifying thesis for what Tsurumi terms an intellectual history is that from 1931 through 1945 the government chose to expand militarily as a means of evading internal problems. Those intellectuals who did not meet the dual expectation of conforming with government policy and providing its theoretical justification were coerced into doing so with the aid of the "age-old tradition of insularity, which had its roots in the preMeiji, pre-industrial era" (p. 120). Within this context the progressive ideals of such intellectuals as the members of the Association for New Man were transformed into state propaganda. Tsurumi calls this ideological transformation "the prevalent form of tenko in the 1930's" (p. 121).
Memory made tangible in the form of culture continually retranslates a nation's experience, as Tsurumi Shunsuke has shown his Japanese audience for more than thirty years. These two works, originally lectures given in 1979-80, offer glimpses into the intellectual, cultural, and popular cultural life of modern Japan documented in his idiosyncratic oeuvre. In 1942 Tsurumi reentered Japan as an outsider returned from study at Harvard at age twenty. This time away may have given him the distance allowing for an engagement with contemporary culture: in 1946, along with his sister Tsurumi Kazuko, Maruyama Masao, Minami Hiroshi, and other intellectuals, he launched Shiso no kagaku, an iconoclastic journal of ideas and attitudes. Since that time there has been no grand historical schema directing Tsurumi's avowedly syncretic analysis. Because he works from the phenomenological assumptions of such Western pragmatists as William James while assuming the populist prejudices of the Japanese folklorists Yanagita Kunio and Origuchi Shinobu, his approach begs categorization. And although there is a political edge to his cultural critique, he adopts neither of the positions of the Western historians of mass culture: he does not speak as an elitist decrying an absence of high culture, nor does he celebrate a Utopian strain in mass culture that can liberate popular consciousness from the effects of colonization. Instead, these two books reveal one underlying irony directing both this historian's treatment of wartime life and his interpretation of postwar popular culture: Tsurumi Shunsuke aims to de-exoticize the everyday practices and beliefs of the people of Japan by romanticizing the mentality of the Japanese masses. An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (SenjikiNihon noseishinshi [Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982]) ranges over such topics as the literature about the Korean experience in twentieth-century Japan, the wartime strategy of the state leadership (which Tsurumi considers both militarist and fascist), and the counter-strategies of such figures as the housewife and the leader of the Christian Watchtower Society. The unifying thesis for what Tsurumi terms an intellectual history is that from 1931 through 1945 the government chose to expand militarily as a means of evading internal problems. Those intellectuals who did not meet the dual expectation of conforming with government policy and providing its theoretical justification were coerced into doing so with the aid of the "age-old tradition of insularity, which had its roots in the preMeiji, pre-industrial era" (p. 120). Within this context the progressive ideals of such intellectuals as the members of the Association for New Man were transformed into state propaganda. Tsurumi calls this ideological transformation "the prevalent form of tenko in the 1930's" (p. 121).