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169 8 Japan in engagement and the discourses of civilisation If civilisational analysis is lacking with respect to Latin America, it has been far from inattentive when it comes to Japan. In previous chapters, Japan serves as an illustration of theoretical engagements with civilisational analysis, as well as illustrating different points of my own argument. The frequent choice of Japan is no coincidence: it has been a focal point of investigation for comparativists in the humanities, the social sciences and political economy with an interest in civilisations
7 Crystallising the ‘Nordic turn’ in Japan and patriarchal decline in China Introduction Peng and Wong explained that ‘exceptionalism’ or ‘welfare laggardness’ within the East Asian model of welfare regimes was blamed on shared Confucian heritages and legacies of patriarchal fatherhood, which held back welfare state development: respect for education, filial piety, deference to authority, patriarchy, and above all the centrality of the family and kinship ties in social organisation – constrained the development of more western conceptions of the welfare state
Contemporary civilisational analysis has emerged in the post-Cold War period as a forming but already controversial field of scholarship. This book focuses on the scholarship produced in this field since the 1970s. It begins with anthropological axioms posited by Ibn Khaldun, Simon Bolivar and George Pachymeres. Three conceptual images of civilisations are prominent in the field. First, civilisations are conceived as socio-cultural units, entities or blocs in an 'integrationist' image. They emerge out of long-term uneven historical processes. Finally, in a 'relational' image civilisations are believed to gain definition and institute developmental patterns through inter-societal and inter-cultural encounters. The book traces the history of semantic developments of the notions of 'civilisation' and 'civilisations' coextensive with the expansion of Europe's empires and consubstantial with colonialism. Early modernities are more important in the long formation of capitalism. Outlining the conceptual framework of inter-civilisational engagement, the book analytically plots the ties instituted by human imaginaries across four dimensions of inter-civilisational engagement. It also interrogates the relationship between oceans, seas and civilisations. Oceanian civilisation exhibits patterns of deep engagement and connection. Though damaged, Pacific cultures have invoked their own counter-imaginary in closer proximity to past islander experiences. Collective memory provides resources for coping with critical issues. The book also explores Latin American and Japanese experiences that shed light on the engagement of civilisations, applying the model of inter-civilisational engagement to modern perspectives in culture and the arts, politics, theology and political economy.
those of European extraction, and treaties with states outside Europe (and America) were unequal, with the sovereignty and independence of the Ottoman Empire, China, Siam, Persia and Japan thereby limited. 13 Civilization linked with progress ‘became a scale by which the countries of the world were categorized into “civilized”, barbarous and savage spheres’, 14 a distinction adhered to by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws , 15 which was common among
of central importance that we understand the conditions for this expansion as well as the tight institutional framework both private voluntary agencies and government players found themselves embedded in. 7 The Korean case is a model in this respect. South Korea, once it was freed from Japanese colonial rule, was one of the first non-European countries to receive post-war relief from the United
law presumed a European monopoly of civilisation in which quasi-juridical criteria were crafted to determine inclusion of the so-called civilised nations (Gong, 1984). As the standard subsided after the First World War, other constructions and appropriations of ‘civilisation’ emerged. Pro-independence elites in Japan, Turkey, India, China and Indonesia confronted Western ideas, partly from their own civilisational vantage-points and partly through critique of the intrinsic inconsistencies of the discourse of civilisations. Plural uses gained greater leverage in
-houses’, which no decent woman would enter. Pearse then turned to the parliamentary column, which reported a debate about a bill for the compulsory teaching of Japanese as a second language in seaport towns and cities. This reflected the growing importance of Japanese as a commercial world language. The Minister of Education opposed the bill, recalling that it was once maintained that English would become the dominant world language when it was now only spoken by a few peasants in Somersetshire. How had this come about? The conquest of England by the Russian republic and the
Singapore is a collective historic memory, namely, of the perpetration of massacres by the Japanese military police ( kempeitai ) in their ‘purge through purification’ ( suqing / 肃清 4 ) during the 1941–1945 occupation. In the popular consciousness this contributed to the perception of an overabundance of wandering and malevolent spirits that needed to be controlled. Thus, early in the Underworld tradition’s development, historical memory and fear of wandering spirits became a common, though perhaps subliminal, contributing factor behind the gradual rise to dominance of
). Support for White Australia spanned the major political parties with, for example, the Australian Labor Party expressing concern about the importation of cheap Asian and Islander labour. This policy was maintained and strengthened until the Second World War (in which Australia’s most direct military conflict was with Japan), after which the immigration of displaced persons and a series of liberalising reforms (culminating in the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act) saw the end of a racially based, and Asia focused, national immigration policy.18 The arrival of 90,000 South
Civil War and the 1938 Japanese attacks on China seemed to vindicate Baldwin’s prediction. The Times reported under the headline ‘Town destroyed in air attack’. 53 In a very emotive report, The Guardian stated ‘Town of ten thousand in ruins … it is not known how many hundreds of people – men, women, and children – have been killed: it may never be known … Many of the people who raced desperately for the open fields were systematically pursued and machine-gunned from the air by swooping fighters.’ 54 In