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164 THEMES INWORLDH ISTORY ‘Overcoming Modernity’ State-centred nationalism found full expression in the 1930s and 1940s as Japan launched wars to extend its empire in China and other parts of Asia, a war that merged into the Second World War after Japan attacked the USA at Pearl Harbor. This period saw greater controls on society, the repression and imprisonment of dissidents, as well as the formation of patriotic societies, many of them women’s organisations, to support the war. An influential symposium on ‘Overcoming Modernity’ in 1943 debated the dilemma facing Japan – of how to combat the West while being modern. A musician, Moroi Saburo, posed the question of how to rescue music from the art of sensory stimulation and restore it to an art of the spirit. He was not rejecting Western music but trying to find a way that went beyond merely rewriting or playing Japanese music on Western ACTIVITY 2 instruments. The philosopher Nishitani Keiji defined ‘modern’ as the unity of three streams of Western thought: the Renaissance, the Would you agree Protestant Reformation, and the rise of natural sciences. He argued with Nishitani’s definition of that Japan’s ‘moral energy’ (a term taken from the German philosopher ‘modern’? Ranke) had helped it to escape colonisation and it was its duty to establish a new world order, a Greater East Asia. For this a new vision that would integrate science and religion was necessary. After Defeat: Re-emerging as a Global Economic Power Japan’sattempttocarveoutacolonialempireendedwithitsdefeatbythe Allied forces. It has been argued that nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to shorten the war. But others think the immense destruction and suffering it caused were unnecessary. Under the US-led Occupation (1945-47) Japan was demilitarised and a new constitution introduced. This had Article 9, the so-called ‘no war clause’ that renounces the use of war as an instrument of state policy. Agrarian reforms, the re-establishment of trade unions and an attempt to dismantle the zaibatsu or large monopoly houses that dominated the Japanese economy were also carried out. Political parties were revived and the first post-war elections held in 1946 where women voted for the first time. TherapidrebuildingoftheJapaneseeconomyafteritsshatteringdefeat was called a post-war ‘miracle’. But it was more than that – it was firmly rooted in its long history. The constitution was democratised only now, but the Japanese had a historic tradition of popular struggles and intellectual engagement with how to broaden political participation. The social cohesion of the pre-war years was strengthened, allowing for acloseworkingofthegovernment,bureaucracyandindustry.USsupport, as well as the demand created by the Korean and the Vietnamese wars also helped the Japanese economy. Reprint 2026-27