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Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) was one of modern Japan's most unique and important critics of capitalism, the emperor system, imperialism, and everyday life in wartime Japan. This collection of translations contains some of Tosaka's most important essays and original articles on Tosaka.

In the decades between the two World Wars, Japan made a dramatic entry into the modern age, expanding its capital industries and urbanizing so quickly as to rival many long-standing Western industrial societies. How the Japanese made sense of the sudden transformation and the subsequent rise of mass culture is the focus of Harry Harootunian's fascinating inquiry into the problems of modernity. Here he examines the work of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who, like their European counterparts, saw modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless change that uprooted the dominant historical culture from its fixed values and substituted a culture based on fantasy and desire. Harootunian not only explains why the Japanese valued philosophical understandings of these events, often over sociological or empirical explanations, but also locates Japan's experience of modernity within a larger global process marked by both modernism and fascism. What caught the attention of Japanese thinkers was how the production of desire actually threatened historical culture. These intellectuals sought to \"overcome\" the materialism and consumerism associated with the West, particularly the United States. They proposed versions of a modernity rooted in cultural authenticity and aimed at infusing meaning into everyday life, whether through art, memory, or community. Harootunian traces these ideas in the works of Yanagita Kunio, Tosaka Jun, Gonda Yasunosuke, and Kon Wajiro, among others, and relates their arguments to those of such European writers as George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille. Harootunian shows that Japanese and European intellectuals shared many of the same concerns, and also stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its late entry into the capitalist, industrial scene should cause historians to view its experience of modernity as an oddity. The author argues that strains of fascism ran throughout most every country in Europe and in many ways resulted from modernizing trends in general. This book, written by a leading scholar of modern Japan, amounts to a major reinterpretation of the nature of Japan's modernity.

Susan Schneider, in her book Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, offers an exceptionally careful and insightful examination of key issues entailed in how we understand AI and ourselves. One of her central concerns is how we might test for machine consciousness. Given the variations in design and function among current and projected AIs, Schneider sees no likely one-size-fits-all test. So, she offers a battery of different tests that she believes together will make such testing more reliable. This seems a wise approach, and reflects the conceptual and pragmatic care Schneider takes throughout the book. Here, Cook examines an understanding of consciousness that draws on Japanese philosophy, particularly that of the highly influential early twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida.

This article attempts to characterize some important aspects of ‘New Korean Confucianism,’ by focusing on the life and thoughts of two major thinkers of 20th century Korea, namely Pak Chonghong (1903–1976) and Yi Sang-ŭn (1905–1976). While there are volumes of studies on ‘New Confucianism’, the focus remains mostly on Chinese academics; however, just like Song–Ming, Neo-Confucianism spread throughout East Asian countries, where a unique and distinct Neo-Confucian model emerged with its own arguments and debates. The New Confucianism that appeared at the turn of the 20th century in an attempt to embrace Western cultural power within a Confucian value system has also been extended and widely adopted in Korea and has transformed itself according to its socio-political environment. Pak and Yi, who lived during and after the Japanese colonial period, struggled to grasp a sense of autonomy as the unique Korean tradition and spirit was about to be swept away by a flood of foreign ideas and social turmoil. Although the two thinkers differed in their approaches—Pak studied Western philosophy and Yi Chinese New Confucianism—they devoted their life to uncovering and systematizing the distinctive structure of Korean traditional philosophy and thereby laid the cornerstone of New Korean Confucianism.

Tetsurô Watsuji (1889-1960) est un philosophe japonais qui, suite à un voyage en Occident et à sa lecture de Heidegger, développe le concept de Fûdo, dans un ouvrage intitulé \"Fûdo : le milieu humain.\" Traduit et commenté par Augustin Berque, ce texte a ouvert le champ de la \"mésologie\" qui se développe dans des allers-retours entre France et Japon notamment.

Kyōka Izumi (1873-1939) has been renowned as representative of Japanese fantastic literature since the 1970s, although he was not highly estimated during his lifetime. He is generally regarded as an emotional writer representing old Japan. The writer, however, had a keen analytical eye on literary discourses, examining structural and technical characteristics of Western fantastic fiction and Japanese horror-story telling. His taste of twilight or in-betweenness urged him to categorize various matters into binary groups, including Western supernatural literature. This article exhibits how this writer’s analyses on narrative discourses, Western influence on his works, and his liking for in-betweenness, strikingly and coincidently, allowed him to write stories having clear similarities with the features of fantastic literature theorized by Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic. Investigating his works’ characteristics sharing the common ground with Western fantastic literature, it intends to reconsider why Kyōka can be regarded as one of greatest fantasists of Japanese literature.

Cet ouvrage a pour objectif de faire découvrir l’importance de la philosophie japonaise du XXe siècle et d’en cerner les enjeux sur la scène contemporaine. Il est articulé autour de cinq grands thèmes, dont le point commun est la recherche d’un nouveau type de subjectivité, non centrée sur elle-même, mais située au sein du monde, comme partie prenante de ce monde. Les meilleurs spécialistes dans le domaine adoptent ici une approche ouvertement multidisciplinaire pour montrer les implications d’une telle subjectivité. Ils s’intéressent notamment aux thématiques du corps, de l’altérité, de la société et du milieu. Leur démarche fait écho à celle des philosophes japonais du siècle dernier, chez qui on retrace un effort constant pour inscrire la différence au cœur de l’identité et se réapproprier les traditions intellectuelles nationales tout en s’ouvrant à la philosophie occidentale. Jacynthe Tremblay a obtenu un doctorat en sciences de la religion de l’Université de Montréal en 1990 et a poursuivi des études post-doctorales à la faculté des lettres de l’Université de Tokyo sous la direction de Sakabe Megumi. Elle est l’auteure, entre autres, de Finitude et devenir. Fondements philosophiques du concept de révélation chez Karl Rahner (Fides, 1992) et de Nishida Kitaro. Le jeu de l’individuel et de l’universel (CNRS Éditions, 2000).

Boundaries were smashed and broken as modernity struck its first blows in Asia in the nineteenth century. The British and the French chipped away at the borders of China, and the USA ripped open the seal that enveloped Japan in sakoku. Imperialism, or neo-imperialism, represented a way of overcoming boundaries, of decreasing the salience of other territorial units. However, it was also a way of expanding boundaries, of projecting one's own territory and sustaining the priority of these new (modern) borders over the claims of (allegedly pre-modern) indigenous peoples. Boundaries themselves began to take on a distinctly modern persona–and they were the property of the modern, Western powers.