Le « dépassement de la modernité » et la sociologie japonaise

Abstract

The dialogue between the Western and Japanese intellectual worlds has been the subject of intense discussion in Japan, the focus being on the opposition between “West” and “East’, “the West and Japan”, “Western modernity” and Japanese “modernity”. To address the issue of Japanese sociology from the Pacific war to present times, the author develops the ideas of “oscillation to and fro” and ”going beyond modernity”. After 1945 there was no noticeable change in Western and/or Japanese modernity; however between 1970 and 1995 Western values were appealed to and, as from 1995, Japanese society emerged as a non-Western modernity. This marked the end of the period of “oscillation to and fro”.

Keywords

• Japanese sociology
• modernity
• orientalism