The Debate on Subjectivity in Postwar Japan: Foundations of Modernism as a Political Critique

T HE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY of modern Japan is punctuated by a series of debates, or rons5, each marking the emergence of concern about a particular problem and carrying that concern to a higher level of intensity, if not always understanding. Major rons5 of the postwar period have focussed on the topics of Showa history, the eniperor system, mass society, and other issues, but one of the earliest and most important of them was the debate on subjectivity, or shutaisei. That controversy was particularly noteworthy, as I will argue below, not merely because it revealed a pivotal dimension of postwar intellectual consciousness, but also because it established in final form the conceptual framework and vocabulary for a mode of political criticism that even today often recommends itself to those who attempt to make sense of Japanese politics. This paper will describe aspects of the context surrounding the original debate, summarize analytically its highlights, and present through the use of examples the main features of modernism as the resultant mode of political criticism. In conclusion, I will speculate on the political implications of the modernist critique. A good deal of ambiguity in meaning surrounds the term shutaisei, which I will either leave untranslated or render as subjectivity. Indeed, it could be argued that the debate on shutaisei, which stirred Japanese intellectual circles in the immediate postwar years from 1946 to 1948, was partly a prolonged attempt to define the term. In brief, as a form of