In But Not Of the World? Japan, Globalization and the ‘End of History’

Abstract

Jean Baudrillard has characterized contemporary Japan as ‘a satellite of the planet earth’ (Baudrillard 1988: 79), as a society and culture both nowhere in relation to the real power centres and points of influence in the modern world system, but yet everywhere in terms of its artifacts and its economic presence. This image of Japan neatly encapsulates the primary tension that has driven Japan forward like the string of a tightly drawn bow from the 1940s until the present. The engine of history for Japan since the Meiji Restoration is not reducible to some internal economic dynamic, but also resides in the problem of the state’s and society’s relationships with the world. Since the Pacific War, itself seen at the time and justified as a reaction and opposition to Western colonialism in Asia and as a result of Japan’s exclusion from the charmed circle of globally significant polities, the ‘world’ has been a problematic category for Japan. Through defeat (and the American use of the ‘A’ Bomb), postwar poverty, the 1960s policy of the ‘Doubling of National Income’, to today’s economic dominance, Japan has struggled with its role in the international systems of economic, political and cultural influence which shape global society. Indeed the onset of the processes of globalization has posed this question again in fresh terms, to which answers are being given in distinctively Japanese terms. This fact alone makes the Japanese case of substantial theoretical and comparative interest.