‘Overcoming Modernity’ State-centred nationalism found full expression in the 1930s and 1940s as Japan launched wars to extend its empire in China and other parts of Asia, a war that merged into the Second World War after Japan attacked the USA at Pearl Harbor. This period saw greater controls on society, the repression and imprisonment of dissidents, as well as the formation of patriotic societies, many of them women’s organisations, to support the war. An influential symposium on ‘Overcoming Modernity’ in debated the dilemma facing Japan – of how to combat the West while being modern. A musician, Moroi Saburo, posed the question of how to rescue music from the art of sensory stimulation and restore it to an art of the spirit.
He was not rejecting Western music but trying to find a way that went beyond merely rewriting or playing Japanese music on Western instruments. The philosopher Nishitani Keiji defined ‘modern’ as the unity of three streams of Western thought: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of natural sciences. He argued that Japan’s ‘moral energy’ (a term taken from the German philosopher Ranke) had helped it to escape colonisation and it was its duty to establish a new world order, a Greater East Asia. For this a new vision that would integrate science and religion was necessary.