ABSTRACT
“Becoming modern” is the main story in the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Japan. Japanese historians have produced a rich literature on the nature of Japan’s modernity and how it differed, for better or worse, from that of the West. Western scholars have tended to pose the question in terms of exploring “the first Asian (or non-Western) society to modernize.” Both perspectives make the same point: the study of modernity is inevitably comparative. And not only in hindsight. Ever since England and France defined the modern by getting there first, most countries have had little choice but to conceive their own modernities in the conceptual frame derived from these historical examples. Germany no less than Japan looked “West” in the nineteenth century to discern the characteristics necessary to the modern. Call it even the “necessary modern,” since its achievement so often appeared compulsory, if not because of imperialist threat, as in Japan’s case, then by virtue of forces ranging from economic development to the allegedly irresistible march of Progress.
