ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book looks at the under-reported direct intellectual influence of the Scottish Enlightenment and its nineteenth-century echoes on Japanese opinion-formers. It explains about the troubled term tradition, usually assumed to be implying a desire for continuity, but readable rather as a desire for discrete pasts, and part of a wider attempt to unsettle the British monopoly on the world-historical. The book suggests that a ‘shadowy’ renegotiation of Newtonian space as a ground of universal subjectivity, in Tanizaki Jun’ichiros In’ei raisan and Kawabata Yasunari’s Yukiguni, and, in another sense, in Watsuji Tetsuros Fuo. The vehicle that takes universalist, globalising thinking to East Asia is the broad British state, and it does so with a sense of belonging to nature and commanding a whole ‘world’.
