大学共同利用機関法人 人間文化研究機構　国立民族学博物館

Objectives

The Westernization or Modernization which Japan undertook from the middle of the nineteenth century was not caused by Japan's becoming a colony of the West. Westernization in Japan was independently generated by the Japanese and by choice, inviting from abroad at high pay elites who were considered the most appropriate advisors in their respective fields, including military technology, while dispatching Japanese elites to Western countries to study. The result was that Japan learned from the West as a whole in a way that was in one sense inconsistent. At the same time, Japan chose not to align itself and not to cooperate in resisting foreign pressure with other Asian societies, which were in a similar situation. Instead Japan decided to become a great power in its own right through a policy of enriching the nation and strengthening the military (fukoku kyohei) involving military aggression against neighboring Asian countries. The end result was that Japan lacked appropriate responses to the world situation, formed an alliance with dictatorial regimes in Germany and Italy, and embarked on a path of destruction culminating in the concept of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere revolving around Japan. The objectives of this joint research are from a broad perspective to compare and contrast these characteristics of Japan's modernization with the modernization processes currently occurring in Asian and African societies, which continue to demand complicated responses from Japan, as well as to thoroughly reexamine modernization in Japan.