Mushanokoji: An excerpt

Mushanokōji Saneatsu was a Japanese writer, painter and philosopher active during the Taishō and Shōwa periods. He was a believer in humanism and individualism, and he was one of Tolstoy's biggest fans. He also wrote a pro-war book during WWII, and was consequently exiled from government during the occupation period.

In the book "Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Author's Autobiography" there is this fascinating passage:

Regarding the book that was the cause of my being exiled after the war, I didn't write it after Japan had begun to fare poorly, but when things still seemed good. I thought that presenting my own thoughts in a book would be a way to cooperate with the national polity more befitting a literary man than going around to give addresses, being made to imitate reporters or being made into a war correspondent. I wrote it on nobody's request or recommendation, and I spoke to the publisher myself in order to get it published. Therefore I'm the one who bears sole responsibility for that book, but at the time there wasn't any problem with what I wrote, and among my books that's not one that didn't sell.　I thought one shouldn't do work one is not suited to. After the war when everyone's views were different and only that book was left behind to get noticed, it was only natural that what hadn't stood out before should have begun to stand out.

But it's not as if I changed my views; while the war was going on I didn't stop my work at Atarashiki Mura [a commune he founded in 1918] for even a moment, and I continued giving speeches at monthly meetings. Never for a moment did I stop wishing for a world in which all people could live out their lives and realize their individuality. It's just that as a Japanese I didn't want to lose. Accordingly, the fact is that I didn't want to lower the Japanese fighting spirit.

Part confession, part defense, part reaffirmation of ideals, I think it really captures the deep confliction of Japan's wartime intellectuals.

What is a cultureist?

What is a cultureist anyway? Well, first and foremost it's a clumsy concatenation of "culutre" and the suffix "ist." Briefly, it describes a person who studies culture. Just like economists study the economy and ecologists study ecology, cultureists study culture.

Much like the economy, culture is an abstracted entity. Everyone agrees that it exists, but no one can say exactly where it is or what it looks like. "The economy" isn't merely the aggregate assets minus the aggregate liabilities of a given region, but a meta entity made up of the countless economic transactions that take place each second, and changes shape with each new transaction, defying attempts to pin it down for study. At the macro level, however, we can observe its organic behavior; expanding or shrinking, growing into new sectors while other sectors die out.

Similarly, culture is not merely the sum of all of the books in all of the libraries, but an abstract entity constructed by the countless cultural transactions that we continuously engage in. Cultural objects are produced, purchased, ignored, consumed, loved, hated, reviewed, commented on and parodied, all of which becomes part of the cultural landscape and is implicitly absorbed by other cultural objects. All of these individual transactions aggregate into a mysterious entity we call "culture." It behaves metabolically; consuming, growing and spreading in irregular and unpredictable ways.

People who study culture are often characterized as academics in an ivory tower, working in the unhelpfully named "humanities" field, writing papers about phallic symbols in Shakespeare's works. I have supplied the term "cultureist" here to reinvent that image. Cultureists are actively engaged in an attempt to understand the mysterious, dynamic entity that is loosely defined but universally recognized as "culture." It both reflects and impels our minds and imaginations. It can bind nations together or split them apart. It affects us all in profound ways, and cultureists struggle to illuminate glimpses of its inscrutable, organic movement. When they are successful they provide insights about its creators, humans, both as a group and as individuals.