ABSTRACT
I am by no means the first, and surely will not be the last to try to make some sense of the Japanese scene as it flashes by. Perhaps it would be more fitting to say as it appears to be flashing by the necessarily fixed vantage point on which any observer must stand. In that effort, I find myself in numerous, if not always the best of company. Among the more illustrious of that number is Arnold Toynbee who, it has been pointed out (Gibney 1985:107), in The Study of History noted that Japan was a classic instance of cultural conflict between two contending factions which he identified as the Herodians and Zealots. It is highly likely that Toynbee assumed initially that one of them was destined to win out in the end, the other to be vanquished. The Herodians, named after Herod Agrippa, who ruled Galilee, pursued a policy of assimilating foreign culture as thoroughly as possible. The Zealots, who take their name from the Maccabees and the early Jewish zealots, championed traditional culture. In the course of his analysis of the Japanese case, it appears that Toynbee had second thoughts about the aptness of his scheme for Japan, for he concludes that the Meiji Restoration represented a pursuit of Zealot ends by Herodian means. Marius Jansen (1970: 111) was making what I take to be the same point when he wrote of the policies pursued by the Meiji oligarchs: ‘Seeking revolution, they preached restoration’. And only thirty years after that revolutionary restoration, Basil Hall Chamberlain (1898:2, 3, 8) commented on one of its salient outcomes:
Whatever you do, don't expatiate, in the presence of Japanese of the new school, on those old, quaint, and beautiful things Japanese which arouse your most genuine admiration…. [For] all this is [today regarded as] merely a backwater. Speaking generally, the educated Japanese have done with their past. They want to be somebody else than what they have been and still partly are…. [Yet] it is abundantly clear to those who have dived beneath the surface of the modern Japanese upheaval that more of the past has been retained than has been let go.
