Monumenta Nipponica

La modernité à l'horizon takes as its springboard the 1920s, one of the most interesting periods in modern Japanese history, a time that spans the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods, or, as editor Jean-Jacques Tschudin prefers to call it, "Greater Taishō" (Taisho elargi). In many ways this decade (and probably the two before it, as well, according to Tschudin), can be seen as the time when Japan went from a top-down model of modernization (at the direction of the government and related institutions such as the educational system and the military), to a more grassroots form of social transformation involving technological innovation, political radicalism, gender role change, and urbanization. The book addresses all these elements within one overarching context, the rapid growth of popular or mass culture during the period. As the English translation of the book's title (Modernity on the Horizon) suggests both implicitly and explicitly, one of its key themes is that the various forms of popular culture arising as the result of rapid industrialization were a key ingredient in the development of "modernity" in twentieth-century Japan.

Although not a theoretical work per se, La modernité à l'horizon does deal with the issue of defining popular culture, often in relation to mass culture, in both its introduction and here and there among the variety of essays that comprise the book. Tschudin probably best sums up the general consensus of the book in his introduction. He acknowledges the slipperiness of both terms, as well as the widely differing ideological approaches taken to mass culture, especially the tendency to condemn mass or popular culture as destroying "authentic culture" through the omnipresence of industrialized products and processes. He goes on to suggest, however, that

[In regards to Taishō Japan] the concept of mass culture should be handled with prudence since, although these years indeed mark the beginning of production that has been made uniform, planned out, and tailored to attract the consumer, they offer simultaneously the picture of a period of trial and error where the initiative remained most often in the hands of the creators. The objectives of the latter were also to some degree variable [and] commercial but remained fundamentally individual.

(p. 13)

This overarching theme of individual creators and products serves La modernité à l'horizon well, as its various chapters take up subjects that include theme parks, popular theater, police procedurals and romance novels, cinema, popular music, and urbanization. Although these topics are dealt with on a general level as well, among the strengths of the book are the glimpses into the day-to-day workings of Taishō culture, such as Claude Hamon's description of the Kansai entrepreneur Kobayashi Ichizō's development of the Hankyū railroad system, or Cecile Sakai's close analysis of the popular writer Kikuchi Kan, or Tschudin's description of a Japanese director's successful importation of Western opera to Asakusa.

The book begins, however, with a more wide-ranging but extremely valuable essay by Stephen Large. Although it is entitled "La culture populaire japonaise des années [End Page 415] 1920: contexte et signification politique" (Japanese Popular Culture in the 1920s: Context and Political Significance), Large goes beyond the political to contextualize the 1920s in terms of both social and economic developments, highlighting what he terms the "complexity, plurality, and ambiguity" of the period and rejecting what he sees as the simplistic distinction between "Taishō Democracy" and "Shōwa Fascism." At the same time he acknowledges that the rapid diffusion of popular culture in the twenties and the concomitant privileging of private life and family, in contrast to the 1930s ideal of service to the state, created a unique moment in twentieth-century Japanese history that also brings up questions of power, play, and liberation. In certain cases these three aspects are even combined, as is clear in Large's analysis of the iconic figure of...