| NOTA |
()(More often than not, what is missing in studies of Japanese figures in English is a feel for the nature of their personalities and for the breadth and motion of their mental lives. Many political biographies of prominent modern Japanese have been published, but few convey a palpable sense of their interior lives. It is the merit of Ms. BernsteinLs portrait of Kawakami Hajime that he emerges as a recognizable human being, a truly modern figure reflecting in his own life a personal and hard-won balance between traditional Japanese values and the demands of modernization. The heir of a samurai family, an acknowledged authority on economics, a professor at one of JapanLs leading universities, an early popularizer of Marxism in Japan, a Japanese Communist on his own unique terms, and, finally, the author of an autobiography that is a classic of modern Japanese literature, Kawakami Hajime is an important figure in the history of modern Japan.@^At each stage of KawakamiLs winding path to Marxism --from patriotic nationalist to academic Marxist to revolutionary Communist-- his concern for the ethical and economic problems that emerged in the course of JapanLs astonishingly rapid industrialization dominated his consciousness. Ms. Bernstein provides a portrait of KawakamiLs complex personality as well as an elegantly shaped narrative of the context and content of Japanese left-wing politics in the 1920s, and she makes plain the kinds of cultural conflict that modernization, in its several varieties, bequeathed to Japanese intellectuals.@Gail Lee Bernstein is Associate Professor of Oriental Studies, the University of Arizona.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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