Interview with George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University, Dr. Carol Gluck (Part 1)

What led you to pursue the field of Japanese studies or modern Japan?

This is an embarrassing question because I have no good answer. The truth is that I was in high school in the Midwest in the United States at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. I must have seen something about Japan, but I don’t know what it was. I have no memory of seeing anything. My family has no memory of my seeing anything, nor do my friends… but somehow I must have seen something because I decided I was interested in Japan. Where I lived and went to school, there was almost nothing said about foreign countries, not Europe, much less Japan. It was very middle America at the time. I come from a Republican family, quite right-wing, and very patriotic: at that point my father even thought it was un-American to travel abroad. I went to an inner-city public high school in Chicago where I learned nothing about Japan or Asia. In fact, nobody knows, including me, why I developed this interest. I could not do anything about it at university because there was no Japanese language or culture taught at my college; only a small number of mostly large universities offered Japanese at that time. So I finished high school and graduated college with a secret — I was interested in Japan, though I didn’t know why. I hadn’t even read any books about it. Looking back, it all seems very strange.

I graduated from college and I began to work as a freelance writer. About six years later, married and living in New York, I thought I might learn Japanese for fun, so I went to Columbia University as a special student enrolled in an intensive course in Japanese language. After one semester, I began to take other courses and soon entered the Ph.D. program, happy finally to be studying about Japan, making good on the secret I’d kept for so long. For years, my high school friends called me “weird” when they heard I was working on Japan -- until the mid-1980s, that is, by which time they had discovered the Walkman and Toyotas and now pronounced me “clever” to be connected to things Japanese. 

My second semester at Columbia was Spring, 1968, the time of the student protests, which introduced me to the ways in which foreign policies (the Vietnam War) were related to racial issues (in Harlem, where Columbia is located). As an entering doctoral student, I was asked whether I planned to study literature or history. Naïve as I was, I thought, “Well, I love literature, and I read novels anyway; maybe I should study history.” I had no background in history; my undergraduate major had been philosophy and pre-medicine. But I decided on history, which I soon saw was a fascinating, if nearly accidental, choice.

I found myself drawn to Meiji history and the process of Japan’s becoming modern. [Before this interview, Dr. Gluck gave a lecture at the Kuraray Head Office. In a Q&A session, someone asked, “How do you select a fact from the facts?”] As I answered the question the other day about how historian choose our facts: I don’t think it was quite an accident in the United States of the 1970s, at a time of critiques of modernization theory and the advent of post-modernism that I was interested in modernity and what it meant to live in modern times. 

For me, Japan was a historically intriguing instance of the ways in which societies became modern. I love Japan and Japanese culture and society, but when it came to scholarship, it was Japan as an instance of the modern that drew my research interest. So I studied the Meiji period; my dissertation and first book (Japan’s Modern Myths) were about Meiji ideology, and I am still interested in modern (kindai and gendai) history, not only during Meiji but up to the present.+

How did you develop the idea of modernity in a global context?

It seems to me that modernity of one sort or another is not optional in the world today. In other words, few societies can simply choose not to be modern. The modern world insists on things like the nation-state, capitalism, political participation, and integration into the world order, whatever form these might take in different places. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Lesotho in Africa or El Salvador in Central America, or South Korea, Kazakhstan, or Japan, elements of the modern are part of your experience. Modernity (kindai-sei) shapes our world. Of course, its characteristics have changed over time, as have attitudes toward it. In some places, people today are critical of modernity and wish to be postmodern or something else, but in many other places they are not tired of the modern at all, especially, though not only, in the Global South. Many want more, not less, of what they think modernity has to offer them. 

Modern history is now several hundred years old, its forms different in different parts of the world. Yet the world remains modern, so to my mind, understanding modernity is a way to understand the world we live in. For this reason it’s not a surprise that over the years, I began to think in terms of transnational comparisons: Japan’s modernity in global context. 

For the last nearly twenty years, I’ve been involved in the Committee of Global Thought at Columbia, which was established with the goal of seeking categories and concepts adequate to the changed world of the 21st century. As a result of this approach, I now see all of history, not only that of Japan, in global context. This doesn’t mean that I directly compare Japan to Indonesia or Greece or wherever: not at all. It means that whatever I’m considering, for example, the years before and after the Meiji Restoration. I look to see how similar issues were being addressed in different times and places. I then come back to studying Japan but often with new questions that were inspired by these other situations. Students at Columbia joke that “in global context” is my middle name, as in “Carol In-Global-Context Gluck,” a name I rather like. In fact, I don’t usually write about those other places. I write about Japan, but I do cast my eye on the global context, to gain what I call the view from “looking elsewhere,” 

Right now, for my research on post-war (sengo), I’ve been looking at other postwars of the Second World War around the world, which had many things in common with Japan’s postwar – more than I had imagined. To understand the Japanese experience of sengo, which after all followed a world war, it makes sense to think of the postwar, too, as a global phenomenon. In modern times, trends are generally in way or another global, so that no society makes its way entirely alone -- which is to say that the history of Japan’s modern experience took place in the context of other modern histories and is most usefully considered in this light.

I believe this for two reasons: the first is that modern phenomena – from the political form of the nation-state to the emphasis on public hygiene (eisei) -- happened globally, not at the same time and not in the same way, but globally nonetheless, not invented in one place by one person or government. And second, taking the global context into consideration helps to counter Japanese (or French or American) exceptionalism. Opinion in these three countries, among many others, tends to believe their country is special, as in “Japan was the only non-western society to modernize in the nineteenth century,” or the national distinctiveness of France (“l'exception française”), or Abraham Lincoln’s phrase about Americans as “the almost chosen people.” That is national pride or nationalism, but it is not history. Japan modernized the way it did not because of some essential Japaneseness as expressed in the discourses of Nihonjinron but for historical reasons, both within late Tokugawa Japan and in the nineteenth-century world at large. In this respect, the comparisons between “successful” Japanese and “unsuccessful” Chinese modernization that were current in the 1970s were asking the wrong question. Looking back, it now seems misguided to claim that Chinese modernity failed, when in fact it unfolded in a different way and at a different time than in Japan, with these differences a result of differences in the historical context in the two societies at the moment of modernization. 

For both these reasons I think that attention to the global context of any and every modern history is helpful. It shows how the world works and also averts the kind of cultural (often nationalistic) explanations that are so strong in the three countries where I have spent a lot of time: the U.S., France, and Japan. Attending to global context is a good antidote against the poison of nationalism and also a pointer toward the reasons why history developed differently in different places. Japan, to mention one simple difference, is a small country with a largely unified population that had lived in peace for more than two hundred years of Tokugawa rule. This in itself was an advantage for the Meiji modernizers, an advantage not present in the 1860s for a large and politically weakened China coming out of the Opium Wars against European powers and the domestic civil war of the Taiping Rebellion. Both the domestic situation and the global context were different for Japan and China of that era, and both are necessary to understand the course of events that followed in each country. Even national history cannot be adequately recounted within the borders of a single nation.

(Interviewer: OHBA Go, Researcher, Center for Innovative Research, National Institutes for the Humanities)