Junk for Code

Japanese modernism?

Courtesy of wood s lot

Yasuo Kuniyoshi:

A Japanese modernist?

By that I mean a modernism that was genuinely Asian: both a culture that was truly modern by virtue of its being universal, and a culture that would overcome the West by subsuming it under a larger synthesis of Western and Asian values.

Japan in the early 20th century was situated uncomfortably on the cusp between Western modernity and its Asian identity. Modern Japan was nation-build state and it represented itself as a nation-state with fixed national borders and deep nationalism. Yet it became an empire, an empire that confronted, and became a part of western modernity which had universal terms.

We in Australia regard Japan as being an Eastern country with Western characteristics. Our pespective is a Western universalism that is tacitly opposed to Japanese exceptionalism. However, Asian countries such as Indonesia view Japan as being Western but with a vague memory of something Eastern.

Somewhere in the 19th century the arts from the East and the West got interwoven. In the late nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth century, Japan firmly embraced the modernist art styles from the West. But at the end of the twentieth century it appears that Japan has, once again, turned to Asia.

Today, Japan is a economic superpower within Asia. It appears to the odd man out in Asia, even to the point of being regarded as 'the Other'. From the perspective of Australia Japan is considered the trend-setter of a radical high tech modernity. It also leads the West in areas such as fashion, architecture, technology, design, computer graphics, popular visual culture, photography, and the new media.

Japan is postmodernity from the perspective of someone living in Adelaide with their back to the southern ocean; shaking of the deep nostalgia for double fronted bluestone cottages of nineteenth architecture; trapped by the twentieth centurys obssession with the car as the core of modernity, and unable to am apparently attempting to escape from history in which all tradition and time are equated with the logics of North Atlantic modernity. If you like, Japan makes history while Adelaide is but a footnote in the endless elaboration of North Atlantic modernity.

I get gloomy at this point.

Americanization is coming through the front door of a radical neoliberalism that pushes tradition and authority aside, and leaving it as a pile of rubble on the margins of the freewheeling market. We are left with have the fragments to pick over as the wind blows hot and dry from the north, the sun bakes the earth, and our skin shrivels from the heat.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 2, 2003 12:59 AM | TrackBack