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Out of a concern with the often implicit western‐centricity of theories of nationalism which are currently dominant, the article proposes to shift the focus of analysis onto the working of human agency in our understanding of nations and nationalism. Drawing from insights from the history of ideas, it argues that, contrary to the modernist account, the rise of nationalism of Japan can be traced back to the rise of Kokugaku in the eighteenth century when westernisation/modernisation had not yet reached Japan. Kokugaku scholars were engaged with intense collective self‐reflection and proposed answers to the question who the Japanese were and what Japan should be without adopting the formula of national imagination generated in the West. The article suggests that a focus on human agency has the potential to free inquires into non‐western parts of the world from the deeply embedded western‐centricity of conventional social theories, thus enriching our understanding of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kosaku Yoshino is one of the few Japanese sociologists who bravely pioneered to tackle the thorny issue of nationalism in postwar Japan I from a sociological perspective i . Kosaku's contributions to the study of nationalism in general, and Japanese nationalism in particular, have been noteworthy and well recognized, particularly in those positive reviews of his celebrated book I Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan i ([4]). Kosaku perceptively points to the call for a "wholesome" ( I kenzen na i ) nationalism in postwar Japan, and he distinguished between two types: the resurgent cultural nationalism and the prudent revivalist nationalism. [Extracted from the article]

Although alien rule is widely assumed to be illegitimate, nationalist resistance to it varies across time and space. This article explores why there was greater nationalist resistance to Japanese colonial rule in Korea than Taiwan from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of World War II. Resistance to alien rulers requires both a supply of participants in nationalist collective action and a demand for national self-determination. The article assesses two principal propositions: (1) that the supply of participants increases to the degree that native elites are stripped of their traditional authority and offered few incentives to collaborate; and (2) that the demand for national self-determination decreases to the degree that alien rule is fair and effective. A comparative analysis of the effects of Japanese alien rule in Taiwan and Korea suggests that nationalist resistance is greater in the earliest phases of occupation, that the greater native elites' opportunities, the weaker the resistance to alien rule; and that the fairer the governance, the weaker the resistance to alien rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the origins of nationalism are sought in global historical trends, few analysts have shown how nations themselves are constituted and re-shaped by circulating global power, ideas and models. The view from East Asia shows that these circulations are mediated by regional developments and interactions which bind these nations together in rivalry and interdependence. The histories of China, Japan and Korea have been closely tied together since the end of the nineteenth century and, with a gap of about thirty years during the Cold War, have intensified once again. The global and regional constitution of nations produces a dialectic between its global form and aspirations and misrecognition of this constitution arising from the self-perception of nationalism as historically immanent. This tension between the global constitution and national misrecognition contributes to the tenacity of nationalism. It also allows us to get a better grasp of the relationship between historical change and structure in nationalism and the relationship between state and popular nationalisms in the countries of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As some of the contributors to the symposium point out below, for the past few years, Kosaku often mentioned his plan to tackle the very contemporary phase of Japanese nationalism from a different angle that he pursued in I Cultural Nationalism of Contemporary Japan i ([3]). Indeed, Yoshino is first and foremost known for I Cultural Nationalism of Contemporary Japan i ([3]), a ground-breaking piece of work on contemporary Japanese nationalism. Yoshino's approach to cultural nationalism not only enables cross-national comparison of matured and maturing consumer society/nation in the world but also can be applied to a study of other topic than nationalism. [Extracted from the article]