The Japanese Renaissance - a study in the experience of reconciliation between identity and modernity

In his new book, “The Japanese Renaissance - A Study of the Experience of Reconciliation between Identity and Modernity,” Moroccan researcher Salman Bounaman seeks to develop an interpretive model for the Japanese experience from a broader civilizational perspective and a more mature and coherent intellectual vision.The book, in two parts (700 pages) and issued by “Minds of Culture” in partnership with the Future Knowledge Center for Research and Studies, identifies the focus of study on the first Japanese Renaissance before the Meiji era, as it focuses on researching its deep roots, going beyond the prevailing pattern of Arab Renaissance literature and some Western studies, which were limited to working on the “Meiji” era, separate from its intellectual and cultural accumulation in the “Tokugawa” era.The author approaches the issue of reconciliation between identity and modernity, as “the ideal introduction to thinking about the Japanese Renaissance.” He thus sought to explore the deep roots and long accumulations of the modern (Meiji) and contemporary (post-1945) Japanese renaissance, seeking to understand the process of the formation of the early Tokuga renaissance since the sixteenth century, and the embryonic seeds of Japanese modernity since the eighteenth century.The research was directed to exploring the political, historical, and cultural context in which the Japanese experience emerged, and to monitoring the components of advancement, its mechanisms, and its internal and external interactions, while tracing the intellectual, political, and religious formulas by which tensions and crises were managed within Japanese society before 1868, and which enabled it to achieve stability, accumulation, and discipline, and to enhance the values ​​of diligence, work, respect for others, and appreciation for creativity.The book’s major thesis, according to the author, was “to follow the slow, complex paths and quiet accumulations extending between 1603 and 1868, to reveal the presence of local identity in building the renaissance, the making of civilization, and the construction of modernity, a presence that connects it to its roots and at the same time opens it to others, thus protecting it from both isolation from oneself and alienation from the other.”He believes that the Japanese experience deserves to be studied with the tools of calm cultural analysis, which reveals mechanisms before issuing judgments, and extracts historical lessons in a careful balance between identifying the unique characteristics of each experience, and benefiting from its general laws without formal reproduction of its path. Then the Japanese success story becomes an understandable model, open to accountability, inspiring other civilizational experiences that search for their own path to renaissance.In its first chapter, the book deals with the political and social system in the Tokugawa era, as it is the institutional basis on which the entire experience was based. Then the second chapter turns to the issue of isolation and managing the relationship with the world, revealing the nature of “intelligent isolation” that preserved Japan’s sovereignty without cutting it off from the world. The third chapter turns to the material and economic accumulations that prepared the economic ground for the renaissance, while the fourth chapter is concerned with the localization of knowledge through writers, translation, and intellectual merchants.The fifth chapter turns to education and human building as the human basis for any possible renaissance. In the sixth chapter, the scope of consideration expands to include the cultural, artistic, and aesthetic renaissance, where a self-sufficient Japanese symbolic language is generated. Then the seventh chapter comes to reveal the spiritual and moral basis of the experience, through a study of the Japanese religious system that formulated the morals of advancement from within its own soil. Chapter Eight concludes this construction with the cultural interpretive model of the Japanese Renaissance, which opens a horizonBenefiting from it in reading the question of Arab modernity.