The Japanese Nation Building in European Comparison

According to the secondary literature of the past decades, many features of Meiji Japan (1868-1912) that were regarded “traditionally Japanese” have been proven to be “invented traditions” of an era of building a modern nation and national consciousness as a part of modernization. Creating a nation state with strong nationalism followed the European developmental pattern, but was built on Japanese cultural traditions. One of the aims of the paper is to trace back the sources of this process, suggesting that premodern and culturalist conceptions of community were used, too. The paper try to suggest that in this respect, the Japanese cultural movement of forming a nation shows similarities not with the nation states of Western Europe (where nationalism strongly attached to modernity) but rather with the “national awakening” movements of the peoples of Central Europe, which have not been dealt with in the secondary literature yet.