Customer Reviews

Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand modernity and capitalism as a global phenomenon. However, if you are looking for information specific to Japan, this isn't the right book. Harootunian is consciously writing against area-studies specialization. Anyone trying to learn about the "Japanese case" will be disappointed. If you confront the book with an open mind (and a lot of patience to work through the myriad theoretical references), it could radically change the way you think.

This book is disgustingly boring, but it comes with a lot of information. The author has no real point and just babbles about the findings of others. The book repeats itself often but not in a constructive way. It is more confusing than anything else, and he often starts talking about things that should not even be in the book. On a positive note the publisher did deliver the book on time for a fair price. I would not recommend this author because he does not have a clear writing style, rather he went crazy with quotes and then threw his little thoughts alongside the quotes and then some how this book was published. Many of the subjects in the book are implicit and you have to dig through a lot of garbage to find anything of interest. However, I would only excuse the terrible grammar and style of this book if it had been translated from Japanese to English. Because of the difference in the languages, I do understand a weird end result as a translation. Only buy this book if: 1 You need it for class. I can't think of any other reason to read it.

Whoever wrote the review that calls this book an "evocation of Japan's attempt to come to grips with the modern world," which is one of the things Amazon puts in its list of editorial reviews, just does not get it. That is precisely the kind of sentiment Harootunian is working against, the assumption that Japan's problems with modernity are the product of Japan's exceptional, unique, or non-Western character. His brilliance is in seeing clearly that the modernity confronted by "the Japanese" was and is a global problematic, and any Japanese deformities vis-a-vis modernity are the products of a global unevenness that is a perpetual characteristic of that modernity, the social, political and cultural milieu of capitalism.

The intellectual history of early 20th-century Japan is an important and understudied topic of great interest to me, and this book seemed like a promising contribution to that field. Unfortunately, it disappoints. Harootunian's pretentious, tortured prose in this book is perhaps meant as a smokescreen for the utterly vacuous nature of its argument--which is, after all, not much more than a slightly highbrow variant of character assassination. That is, a few radically leftist thinkers such as the Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun are given preference and almost lionized, while non-Marxist philosophers and thinkers are consistently undercut and more or less blamed for the rise of "fascism" in Japan. Obviously in a book of this bulk the presentation is more complex, but it all seems to boil down to this simplistic, sweeping judgment--and, due to the regular citations of Western Marxist thinkers like Louis Althusser and Walter Benjamin, I can't help but suspect this analysis results more from the author's own political biases than from an even-handed attempt to understand the thinkers and philosophers in question within their actual context. This is especially a shame because many of the thinkers discussed here are important and fascinating; they deserve much further study in English, but the demonization perpetrated against them by Harootunian tends to discourage such inquiry as well as distort their image--they themselves are dead and gone and can't respond to such slander, and few Americans have access to enough other sources to make an informed judgment.

Furthermore, translation errors and general carelessness mar this work irreparably. There are some interesting arguments here and there in the book, but in general hardly anything reliable about Japanese intellectual life during this complicated and interesting time period can really be gained from this lackluster work.

This book is totally incomprehensible; if you see it on a syllabus drop the course. Its a theoritical analysis of theoritical analyseses of art and history, and its incredibly poorly written. I think. I'm an undergrad a top 10 university, I've spent most of the last two days reading this book and I'm not even sure what its about, much less what he's actually trying to say.