"The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic"
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"Cataclysmic" is doing the heavy lifting here: it turns modernization from a success story into a disaster narrative, a word choice that refuses the usual triumphalist shorthand of "development" or "progress". Oe, a writer who came of age in the rubble of World War II and made a career out of interrogating national myth, is pointing at a particular Japanese bargain: remake the state in the image of Western modernity, and accept whatever psychic and political violence that remake requires.
The line’s bite is in its implied causality. Japan didn’t simply modernize; it tried to "build up a modern state modelled on the West" - an act of imitation that carries humiliation as well as ambition. The subtext is that copying is never neutral. When a nation imports institutional forms, it also imports the prestige hierarchy behind them, and scrambles to prove it belongs. In Japan’s case, that scramble fed militarization and empire, culminating in catastrophe at home: defeat, occupation, and a postwar identity crisis that still shadows public life.
Oe’s phrasing also quietly indicts the West without letting Japan off the hook. "Modelled on" suggests the template itself is implicated: modern statecraft, as exported, arrives entangled with coercion, surveillance, and an appetite for expansion. The sentence reads like an anti-modern parable, but it’s really an anti-complacency warning: the cost of becoming "modern" is often paid in ruptured memory, distorted ethics, and a national story rewritten to make trauma look like inevitability.
The line’s bite is in its implied causality. Japan didn’t simply modernize; it tried to "build up a modern state modelled on the West" - an act of imitation that carries humiliation as well as ambition. The subtext is that copying is never neutral. When a nation imports institutional forms, it also imports the prestige hierarchy behind them, and scrambles to prove it belongs. In Japan’s case, that scramble fed militarization and empire, culminating in catastrophe at home: defeat, occupation, and a postwar identity crisis that still shadows public life.
Oe’s phrasing also quietly indicts the West without letting Japan off the hook. "Modelled on" suggests the template itself is implicated: modern statecraft, as exported, arrives entangled with coercion, surveillance, and an appetite for expansion. The sentence reads like an anti-modern parable, but it’s really an anti-complacency warning: the cost of becoming "modern" is often paid in ruptured memory, distorted ethics, and a national story rewritten to make trauma look like inevitability.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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