Inner Worlds
Interiority and Capitalist Modernity in Japan
Explores the connections among interiority, capitalism, and fascism in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Japan
Description
Inner Worlds examines the emergence and operation of representations of interiority—consciousness, “folk mind,” “spirit”—in Japan from its industrial revolution to the rise of fascism during the interwar period. These representations functioned to reproduce the capitalist system by containing its excesses. Thus, poverty in the 1880s was ostensibly the result of defects in one’s innate mental character. A degenerate “crowd mind” explained the strikes and riots of the early twentieth century. State subversion during the 1930s supposedly reflected an attenuated “folk spirit.” By locating the roots of capitalism’s excesses not within the socioeconomic order itself but within a defective interiority, ideologies of interiority operated to contain disruptions to Japan’s socioeconomic order, conceal its defects, and sustain the capitalist system. Inner Worlds reveals how interiority was constituted in ways consistent with both the demands of the emerging capitalist order of the late nineteenth century and the conditions that coalesced to form a fascist conjecture in the 1930s.
Richard M Reitan is Professor of History at Franklin & Marshall College.
Reviews
"Inner Worlds makes a very important and timely intervention in the fields of Japanese history, intellectual history, and political history. Reitan situates the idea of ‘interiority’ within the historical-material conditions in which it emerged and explains how its conceptual transformations were entwined with the changing sociopolitical situation of prewar Japan."
- Max Ward, Middlebury College
“Reitan’s Inner Worlds convincingly critiques the epistemological foundations of liberal and fascist ideology in modern Japan by analyzing a vast discourse on interiority (naikai) produced during the Meiji period (1868-1912). This discourse disavowed historical-materialist critiques of capitalism’s excesses by representing the anxieties and anger of the impoverished masses with social, ahistorical, and aestheticized ideas of individual survival and national belonging. To understand liberal and fascist ideology in Japan—past and present—Inner Worlds is a must read.”
- Ken Kawashima, University of Toronto