100 books like Overcome by Modernity

This book is probably the first scholarly book that blew my mind and pushed me to want to know what else I had always gotten wrong.

Where, like most people I know, I had always thought that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was just a thing that happened because of “war,” this book made it clear why it happened.

The US and Japan, both diplomats and everyday people, did not choose to understand each other. Different world views, different assumptions, and plain old racism led the US and Japan into a horrific, bloody conflict with long-lasting consequences.

JaHyun Kim Haboush passed away in 2011 and was a leading historian of Korea. Her book, The Great East Asian War was published posthumously with the help of her husband, William Haboush’s editing. Although I do not work on Korea, I found this book extremely helpful in understanding the premodern roots of Korean nationalism. Haboush argues that Koreans began to get a sense of national identity when Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea in 1592-1598. She carefully shows how this sense of nation emerged by focusing on language and other symbolism. I teach this book in my East Asian History class and students find it both informative and enlightening. In some ways, it supplements Wang Hui’s discussion of early modernity in China.

This book provides an accessible introduction to butoh. Centered on the perspectives of its co-founder Kazuo Ohno and his son Yoshito Ohno, the first half of the book by Yoshito offers a useful outline of Kazuo’s life in dance. The second half provides insightful personal reflections, evocative photographs, detailed processes, and some of the relationships deriving from Kazuo’s workshops in his studio in Yokohama. The book reflects on Ohno’s distinctly ‘modern’ sensibility and worldview, as compared with the experimental-traditional fusion of butoh’s co-founder, Hijikata Tatsumi. Their mutual interest in the non-human and non-living generated a unique dance form that continues in the present.

In Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan, the social historian Mikiso Hane offers neglected insights on Japanese society from the margins. Hane’s people's history of modern Japan uses diaries, memoirs, fiction, trial testimony, personal recollections, and eyewitness accounts of peasants, factory and industrial workers, and outsiders to detail lived experiences of ordinary people. The perspective from the underclasses resonates with Hijikata’s butoh and his life experiences.

For a general overview of Japanese theatre, and more broadly Japanese culture, readers are encouraged to have a look through A History of Japanese Theatre edited by Jonah Salz. This encyclopaedic collection of essays by scholars on Japanese theatre history offers a rich and thorough survey of Japanese theatre for a wide readership. From ancient Noh theatre to Kabuki and Bunraku to modern literary theatre to critical theatre and performance, readers can glean how the performing arts have developed throughout Japanese history. As the book weaves together some of the intellectual concerns and artistic reflections of prominent artists in their forms, we can grasp interwoven historical patterns which continue from antiquity to the present.

Wang Hui changed the way I look at Chinese intellectual history and the above book is a translation of the introduction to his magnum opus, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. The book argues for an indigenous proto or early modernity emerging during the Song Dynasty or the tenth century in China. He shows how Chinese thinkers expressed ideas of equality and had fairly sophisticated bureaucracies by the tenth century. Moreover, through his analysis, he challenges the distinction between the nation-state and empire. Normally, we think of modernity as connected to premodernity and the nation connected to the modern. However, looking at the Chinese context, Wang shows that although the Song had certain characteristics of a nation-state, the Yuan was an empire, followed by the Ming, which again resembled a nation, but this was followed by the Qing, which was another multi-ethnic empire. Moreover, each of these dynasties continued… show more.

I am greatly impressed by the breadth and ambition of this book. It covers China, Japan, and India and is consequently truly transnational in scope. The book also attempts to relate intellectual history or the history of philosophy to problems that we face today, such as how we can transform our practices to that we can avoid environmental disasters. Duara argues that Asian traditions, given their stress on the interdependence between human beings and nature, might be able to help in this path. Duara’s book poses an important question, namely how to connect Asian intellectual history to concrete problems related to global capitalism. 

I found this book a creative addition to the books that attempt to find the origins of modernity in East Asia before contact with the West. Rather than looking at nationalism, Ikegami examines the individualism embedded in the ethics of the samurai. She then shows how starting with Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s ban on swords in the late sixteenth century and the eventual consolidation of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603, such individualism had to be curbed or transformed. From this perspective, early modernity in Japan was associated with the emergence of a centralized state that ruled out certain forms of spontaneous aggression, what Weber called the monopoly of violence. 

I love the clarity and the bold historically informed orientation, and that the proposal on how to act for the common good takes ideas from different virtue ethics around the world (from Aristotle’s European to Asian ones in Confucius, Watzusian ethics in Japan, etc.).

They are so different from how current politics act with only power in mind. This book is sensitive to local insights and has strong realist basis for global ethics for business. 

I got this book as a teenager. As a WWII history buff, I read it cover to cover so many times that the cover wore off. This is a complete account of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. From the workers dipping soup with their oily hands to eat on breaks while trying to free men from the capsized USS Oklahoma to the use of coke bottles to store donor blood, it is a gritty account of the bravery of the U.S. forces caught by surprise by the attack. While newer books on Pearl Harbor have been published, this one is still my favorite.