Japan Aspects and Destinies

First published in 2007. At the turn of the twentieth century, the author spent three years in Japan, at the heart of what he saw as a revolution. The modernization of the Meiji era was well underway, but far from complete. All around him, Watson saw orientalism and feudalism jostling with the twentieth century, in strange juxtapositions that produced a melange that he found inspiring, disappointing and irritating but always interesting for, as he wrote, there had been no spectacle on earth like it since time began. While other observers of Japan wrote of the Old or the New Japan, or suggested that the transition from one to the other had been accomplished easily and gracefully, Watson set out to reveal all the contradictions, anachronisms, tragicomic consequences and peculiar manifestations of Meiji westernisation. His eye and pen are sharp, but his underlying concern is what the ultimate outcome of this enforced modernisation will be. The question always before him is - can a nation forget its origins, identity and culture? Watson prowls the material and immaterial world of Tokyo, metropolis of the revolution, alert for dissonance. The Japanese dress reform movement produces costumes of supreme inelegance; the simplicity of the Japanese home is disturbed by the discords of European 'innovations', the bathhouses are no longer mixed. As the book ends, Watson sees constitutional government in Japan losing ground – an intimation of the political events of the next half-century. This is a thought-provoking book, first for the unique account it gives of the contradictions and tensions beneath the surface of the accepted version of the Japanese modernisation narrative, and also for the questions Watson poses about the effect of westernisation of Japanese identity and nationality, as timely now as it was a century ago.