‘Overcoming Modernity’

The Dilemma of Being Modern While Resisting the West

By the 1930s and 1940s, Japan's state-centred nationalism had reached its fullest expression. The country launched wars to extend its empire across China and other parts of Asia, and these conflicts merged into the Second World War after Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. This period brought tighter controls over society, the repression and imprisonment of dissidents, and the formation of patriotic societies — many of them women's organisations — all geared toward supporting the war effort.

It was in this charged atmosphere that an influential symposium titled 'Overcoming Modernity' was held in 1943. The symposium debated a dilemma that lay at the heart of Japan's situation: how could Japan combat the West while itself being modern? The very framing of the question shows how deeply the Japanese intellectual elite felt the tension between adopting Western techniques and institutions, and resisting Western domination.

Two Thinkers, Two Answers

The musician Moroi Saburo raised the question in the realm of art. He asked how music could be rescued from being merely an art of sensory stimulation and restored to an art of the spirit. Crucially, Moroi was not rejecting Western music outright. He was searching for a path that went beyond simply rewriting Japanese music for Western instruments, or playing it on them. The challenge was to create something genuinely new — a music that drew on both traditions without being a mere imitation of either.

The philosopher Nishitani Keiji approached the problem from a broader historical angle. He defined the 'modern' as the unity of three streams of Western thought: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of the natural sciences. Nishitani argued that Japan's 'moral energy' — a term he borrowed from the German philosopher Ranke — had saved the country from colonisation. Precisely because of this moral strength, he believed, Japan had a duty to establish a new world order, a Greater East Asia. For this mission, he insisted, a new vision was necessary, one that would integrate science and religion.

What the Debate Reveals

The 1943 symposium shows how Japanese intellectuals grappled with the cultural and philosophical costs of modernisation. On one side stood the practical need for Western science, technology and organisational forms. On the other stood the desire to preserve a distinct Japanese spiritual identity. The debate was not academic in isolation — it was directly tied to the war, to empire-building, and to the ideology of a Greater East Asia that Japan used to justify its expansion. …