ABSTRACT
In his famous Introduction to a Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève concluded that ‘It may be that the future of the world, and thus the sense of the present and the significance of the past, will depend in the last analysis on contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s works’.1 It will be argued in this chapter that none of these contemporary interpretations may matter more than the effort to grasp modern Japan’s significance in Hegelian terms.
