Uneven Moments is a collection of articles written over a period of forty-one years by Harry Harootunian, a leading voice in Japanese intellectual history. It describes the fascinating and cohesive arc of Harootunian's research trajectory and intellectual development during this time. The trajectory arc length is breathtaking. It traverses the economic and social transformations in late Tokugawa Japan; Japan's interwar years and uncertainty following Japan's defeat; the political function of US Area Studies in shaping and reinforcing US foreign policy and US–Japanese post-war relations; the Fukushima disaster; and the use of the past by conservative politicians such as Ōhira Masayoshi and Abe Shinzō for political agendas aimed at arresting the decline of Japan as an economic and regional power.
Harootunian's standing in US-Japanese studies is defined by a career built on dissent and unconventionality. His dissent started early when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the mid- to late 1950s. Modernization theory was the dominant mode of analysis, and as the section on Area Studies shows in this book, Harootunian chafed at the intellectual fetters placed on him. What Uneven Moments reveals is that Harootunian's intellectual trajectory was significantly shaped by Japanese historiography, specifically, Japanese Marxist historiography on the Meiji Restoration, which focused on the question of whether Japan's feudalism would have developed capitalist modes of production had Perry's black ships not arrived on Japanese shores. A key concern of this body of scholarship was how to make sense of the inherent contradiction embedded in the Meiji Restoration: the antithetical impulses of restoration and change, mytho-historical repetition and revolution (p. 16).
Japanese historical materialism also supplies Harootunian with the initial coordinates for his enquiries into the expansion of capitalism in a non-European setting. In many ways, Uneven Moments is Harootunian's homage to the rich vein of Japanese historiography from which he has drawn intellectual inspiration during various stages of his career. This is most clearly seen in the two essays on Tosaka Jun and Hani Gorō respectively. The piece on Hani is highly revealing as it also fleetingly lays bare the skeleton of Harootunian's methodology.
Japanese historical materialism may shape Harootunian's research arc, but modernization/convergence theory gives his work its thematic agenda, albeit as a template to negate. His two essays “Cultural Politics in Tokugawa Japan” and “Late Tokugawa Culture and Thought” are a fine example. The essays challenge the idea of Japanese modernization as an evolutionary process of cultural endowment, specifically, the argument that Japanese religious traditions gave moral and social sanction to processes of economic rationalization during the Tokugawa period. The picture that these two essays outline is topsy-turvy to the one drawn by modernization theory. Harootunian's essays reveal a world constituted of diverse and competing religious beliefs and practices (Tokugawa neo-Confucianism-vs-kokugaku communitarian beliefs centred on the village-vs-millenarian movements of the ruled) rather than any dominant spiritual authority. Moreover, his focus on the culture of asobi and communitarian kokugaku beliefs centred on the pleasures of the here and now (good food, wine, love and sexual passion) divulges a world in which the rhythms of everyday life were not subordinated to work, and where activities in the pursuit of pleasure and gratification were not derided as wasteful, immoral or undermining the ability of society to reproduce itself. Contrary to the modernization theory template, Harootunian shows that reproduction was not subordinated to production, nor was religious belief and practice the carrier of inner-worldly asceticism connected to the disciplining of bodies for work.
Harootunian's essays on modern Japan deal with the question of the subordination of culture to capitalist organized labour and the activities of life bent and moulded to the needs of capitalist development. This reversal of labour relations to everyday life after the Meiji Restoration – the transition from the subordination of work to non-work life to the subservience of life to production – produced a new consciousness of time. A time of clocks and production calendars: segmented, serial, culminative and irreversible. Harootunian argues that this perception of time is shared by modern historicism with its insistence on narratives that see the past as the study of progress and purpose along a linear sequence of events that culminate in the present. This type of historicism, argues Harootunian, lacks the analytical tools to identify the real characteristics of capitalism: the appropriation of existing economic practices by capitalist modes of accumulation. The result is that older economic forms are misrecognized as standing in for an evolutionary pattern of continuity and progress with the past, rather than processes of unevenness that come with the fusing of multiple temporalities – the coexistence of older economic forms alongside capitalist forms of accumulation in the present – onto the everyday relations encompassing work.
The concepts of unevenness and multiple temporalities work in tandem and are key to Harootunian's research agenda on interwar and postwar Japan. Capitalism development is uneven in two distinct ways. First, capital development is not evenly spread, leading to structural inequalities between city and country, metropole and colonial outpost, developed and developing nations. Second, there is no universal model of capitalism development. Capitalism development across the world is quantitatively independent from nation to nation because of its ability to appropriate economic forms that already exist. For example, the economic conditions of Japanese peasantry in pre-war Japan were based on older economic practices of appropriation that capital found useful for its own production necessities. Second, capitalist development in Japan was made of mixed and competing economic forms. Older forms of economic practice appropriated by capital were not fully assimilated, and thus appeared out-of-sync due to their residual resistance to the commodification of life.
For Harootunian, there is an important subjective element to the material reality of mixed economic forms. The structural contradictions inherent within a capitalist economy were subjectively experienced as a crisis of a present that had lost its moorings and cultural endowment. Harootunian sees the emergence of this experience as a historical watermark “in the production of discourses on culture” aimed at bending “cultural relations to politics” (p. 2). The formation of this subjective experience was a product of the collision between the lived and the conceived that plagued modern Japan as it sought to overcome the flux of capitalist modernity, the dialectic of politics (unevenness and inequality) and culture (timeless and stable order), history (material reality of labour and production processes) and memory (the achievements of an earlier time), event (rapid urbanization and new social relations) and experience (precariousness and loss of identity).
Uneven Moments deserves to be read by any serious student and scholar interested in the formation of the modern world and Japan as world history. It presents capitalism as a global phenomenon with a complex history of mixed and contradictory economic forms. A history recognized by Japanese Marxist scholarship, but one at best marginalized, at worst ignored, in most Western institutes of higher learning. The significance of Harootunian's essays lies in the challenge they pose to the modes of cognition and retention utilized by modern historiography. The way we write and speak about the past, argues Harootunian, transposes the concept of tradition to the beginning of the story, rather than at the end where it properly belongs. That is, it treats the historical effect of present capitalist relations, the naturalizing of past practices as timeless cultural endowment, as if it was historical cause.
