The lecture was about the intellectuals in the Nordic countries in the 19th century and their close relationship to the state, their notion of being the periphery of Europe and of being a late-comers because of the scarce population. And I thought that we can say almost the same thing for Japanese intellectuals in the period from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century.
Like the intellectuals in Nordic countries, many Japanese intellectuals made pilgrimage to the countries such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany which was regarded by Japanese elite as the most developed countries in the world at that time. They also must have had an idea of being far away from the centre of the world, and I think this idea was caused and promoted by two facts. The first fact is that Japan is located far away from Europe, much farther away from the ‘centre’(as the intellectuals in the ‘periphery’ called) than Nordic countries are located. The second is that Japan had opened its borders to the rest of the world after 300 years of what we call “Sakoku”, the national isolation where the government severely restricted people’s movements across its border(the countries for trade were restricted to the two countries: China and the Netherlands). Having been ignorant about the world affairs(e.g. colonization of Africa, the Americas, and Asia by some Western nations) and having been shocked by the significant gap between European ‘central’ nations’ and Japan’s standards in economy, political system, technologies and so on, Japanese intellectuals felt overwhelming urge to raise the country’s standards in such fields to the same level as those of ‘central’ nations and even to overtake them. Then, these strong European nations would acknowledge the small country in the far east as a nation with as high standards as theirs and Japan could not be colonized. In this sense, I think we can say Japanese intellectuals were also loyal to their nation as Nordic intellectuals.
Also, in the lecture, it was said that Swedes began to think themselves as a centre during 20th century. In my impression, similar thing can be said to Japan in both periods before and after the Second World War. After the war, Japanese people began to see themselves as a centre of Asia, being proud of being the citizen of the first Asian nation which had achieved modernization and which had beaten a Wester nation. After the war when Japan achieved a dramatic economic growth, people again started to have an idea of being the centre. So, I think both Japanese and Nordic intellectuals had a similar history in terms of the idea of peripherality and the following idea of being centre.
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