Japan: At the junctures of refining and transcending culture

The idea of an essential Japanese culture served as an important signifier that implicated the Japanese in their everyday lives, something which allowed all Japanese to identify with and conceive of as a natural "given". Within a modernizing world however, the assumption of a preexisting culture only provided a means to imagine an escape from the present existing problems. In failing to approach the unevennesses within everyday life, culture itself became commodified within a unified view of the nation.;In this paper I will examine the hegemonic grounds on which the articulations of an essential culture and the creation of an orderly nation were based following the Meiji Revolution of 1868 until the Kyoto symposium of 1942. I will argue that efforts made by key thinkers to defend a Japanese culture could only further affirm the penetration of a capitalist economy within people's everyday lives.