Historians who work with those world systems that functioned in full force before incorporation into the Gregorian calendar should find much to ponder in this collection of essays because Karatani Kojin demands that readers engage the past in more meaningful ways than simply as a series of dots along a predetermined timeline.
For those of us thinking about Japan, making reference to imperial reign names can offer conceptual excitement. For example, one could write, “In early Meiji—1873 to be precise—Japan adopted the Western calendar,” and so on. While some who “practice” Japan remain fluent with pre- and early modern imperial-era markers, such as “Ansei,” their numbers are dwindling as fast as the kanbun requirements once deemed vital for doctoral imprimatur in Japanese studies. Monolithic adjectival placeholders centered on sites of central governance—“Edo” and “Kamakura”—now more commonly hold together distant times.
In this mix, in a series of fascinating essays in History and Repetition, Japan's foremost critical thinker, Karatani Kojin, turns his lens on fundamental questions of time across time (predominantly in Japan), people and places within time and as markers of time, and, most pointedly, whether repetitive patterns appear throughout time. Because Karatiani is chiefly concerned with capitalism's role in such problems, his attention centers primarily on modern dimensions of such phenomena vis-à-vis the interplay between universal presumptions of world time and its assumed forward march, all in collision with Japan's modern imperial markers. So doing, he discovers more the “repetition of Meiji in Showa” (p. 53) than the “repetition of the 1930s” “that increasing numbers of people pointed out (in the early 1990s)” (p. viii). Furthermore, Karatani underscores various and significant patterns endemic to cycles of capitalist modernity (all of which might best be imagined as lumpy parabolic forms, although other shapes would work, too).
Karatani's intelligence is prodigious, and each of the collection's diverse pieces (edited and lucidly translated by Seiji Lippit and several others) assumes that the reader has already engaged with the previous essay in the book, bringing author and reader simultaneously into constant confrontation with the modern. At the same time, Karatani's brilliant command of Japan's long history of ideas and art and warfare underscores and gives weight to his designated breaks. In other words, Karatani's supple and rich grasp of the workings and belief systems inherent to True Land Buddhism, for example (made clear in the chapter “Buddhism and Fascism”), make his sweeping claims about “the concept of the Middle Ages” in Germany (in a prior chapter, p. 50) ring true. On top of this, Karatani's plentiful and grand statements about the meaning of finding meaning in and through time comes with his own sense of the irony involved and is made manifest throughout: “Earlier,” he writes, “I mentioned that periodization according to era names produces an illusion; we must be aware that any division has the potential to produce such illusions. . . . Periodization, however, is indispensable to history. To mark off a period—that is, to assign a beginning and an end—is to understand the significance of events” (pp. 49–50).
Each essay offers much to chew on, yet two truly stand out: “The Allegory of Oe Kenzaburo” (pp. 87–114) and “Buddhism and Fascism” (pp. 173–209). In these pieces, in elegantly complementary ways, Karatani interrogates deep questions of human existence in terms of contingency and generality. He beautifully explains, for example, how Oe's “‘village of a whole’ can be seen to represent the whole of modern Japanese history, good and bad. Against this totality, ‘I’ claims to be nothing more than a ‘passerby’ . . . [with the story's protagonists'] collaboration and enmity represent[ing] modern Japanese history itself” (pp. 109–10). Karatani demonstrates how Oe's break with earlier narrative forms allows his stories to achieve an overarching truth through their specificity. In similar ways, Karatani shows that True Land Buddhism's strategic engagement with various political developments at different times throughout Japanese history enabled its powerful growth while bringing about the demise of “its significance as a religion. Even today, the majority of Japanese belong to patron households dating to the Tokugawa [Edo] period [1600–1867], but they do not see themselves as Buddhists” (p. 177).
To repeat, this collection's signal strength lies with Karatani's deep knowledge of Japanese peoples' engagement with their surroundings across time; his penetrating grasp of this world makes trenchant his concerns and makes them worthy of serious attention by all who think that modernity—as well as Japan's confrontation with and existence in it—deserves profound consideration.
