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The Overcoming Modernity symposium that took place in wartime Japan (in summer 1942) gained notoriety in the postwar period, as a centrepiece of wartime propaganda justifying and legitimising Japanese military actions across Asia. While the published proceedings of the symposium were not as widely read as its postwar notoriety suggests, the phrase ‘overcoming modernity’ certainly captured the zeitgeist of the time in which ‘modernity’ was questioned, debated and contested. The efforts to examine ‘modernity’ in the first half of the twentieth century in Japan were led by a group of philosophers and intellectuals often referred to as the Kyoto School of philosophy because the school mainly drew its members from the Philosophy Department of the Imperial University of Kyoto, but their efforts were not made in isolation. Questioning of modernity in the form of western civilisation had been gathering pace in the West since the end of the nineteenth century, which the members of the Kyoto School were all well aware of. This naturally leads to a few questions: What did the Kyoto School mean by ‘modernity’ in this intellectual climate? Does their ‘modernity’ justify their claim to have overcome modernity? The paper explores what the wartime Japanese intellectuals including the members of the Kyoto School understood as modernity and what they suggested as a way of overcoming it by examining two sets of symposia that took place between 1941 and 1942: the Overcoming Modernity symposium (1942) and the Chūōkōron symposia (1941–42). This examination has implications for theoretical debates on modernity, in particular, on the strengths of the multiple modernities thesis.

This article reviews recent developments in scholarship on gastronationalism, or more broadly, food and nationalism. It finds while the concept of gastronationalismper sehas not been rigorously developed, scholarship of food and nationalism in general has been developing fast. A major development in the study of gastronationalism is the introduction of the everyday nationhood/banal nationalism perspective, which in turn diverts the focus away from the state’s intervention, a point emphasized by Michaela DeSoucey. The review of the field suggests that a renewed focus on the role of food in the interaction between state actors and international organizations would further refine the concept of gastronationalism. As for the study of food and nationalism, efforts to integrate findings from existing case studies to produce an overall understanding of society are needed.

Jon Thares Davidann, professor of history at Hawai’i Pacific University, has indeed produced a highly ambitious survey of recent intellectual history in America and East Asia in The Limits of Weste...

Focusing on food (in)security, this paper argues that the Covid-19 pandemic has shed light on what has been so far neglected in the on-going Brexit discussions. The current pandemic has produced startling images of empty supermarket shelves, shortages of farm workers, increased use of food banks and heightened concern over the health of those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale due to the lockdown. We argue that food insecurity was not created by the current pandemic but is a serious underlying issue in the UK, which has not been adequately considered in discussions about Brexit. In other words, the pandemic has simply highlighted the risk that Brexit will worsen food insecurity and the health of those already disadvantaged. We argue that the pandemic provides an opportunity for UK policy makers to consider the impact of food trade deals on food insecurity, one which we urge them to take.

This article examines the ways in which national identity was articulated by intellectuals in Japan, China and Taiwan in the first half of the twentieth century as a first step to reviewing the sta...

This chapter examines the development of political modernity in East Asia in the early twentieth century through an exploration of the ways in which ideas about political community were produced, used and appropriated by both the imperialists and the colonised. Inspired by the theory of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2000), this chapter focuses on the ways in which Asianism was developed and acted upon by Eastern Asian intellectuals to define modernity in their own terms. In particular, the chapter reviews the ways in which various ideas associated with Asianism, articulated within the context of the philosophy of world history by the Kyoto School, were engaged by colonial intellectuals in Taiwan, Korea and China, which represented an exercise of agency and subjectivity on the part of the colonised. These ideas include schemes such as the East Asian Community (東亜協同体) and the East Asia League (東亜連盟). These initiatives clearly were tools of Japanese colonial oppression, but attempts were made by intellectuals in various parts of the Japanese Empire to make use of these ideas in order to resist, challenge and even subvert Japanese imperialism. Although these attempts were ultimately unsuccessful, by examining the ways in which the oppressed and subjugated tried to mobilise the ideas of the oppressor in order to resist and subvert the oppression, the chapter calls for a more agency-centered investigation of the ideas used by the colonised and the oppressed in the unfolding of modernity.

The chapter examines the analytical scope of the banal nationalism perspective by applying it to the level of international governance focusing on the inclusion of food culture/cuisine in UNSESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list. Through an examination of the world heritage regime in general and two examples of inscription in the list, washoku of Japan and the gastronomic meal of the French in particular, the chapter shows that banal nationalism is at work even at the international/global level and contributes to the reinforcement of the nation state system thanks to a variety of factors: the contradictory status of UNESCO as the promoter of the universal values through the protection of the particular, the emerging human rights discourse and the entrenchment of romanticism-inspired cult of authenticity.

Contents: Preface Introduction, Atsuko Ichijo and Willfried Spohn A balancing act: British state and nation formation and 'Europe', Atsuko Ichijo Germany: from Kulturnation to Europeanization?, Michael Minkenberg Austria: from Habsburg empire to a small nation in Europe, Willfried Spohn A European Spain: the recovery of Spanish self-esteem and international prestige, Pablo JA!uregui and Antonia M. Ruiz-Jimenez Italy and Europe: internal others and external challenges to national identity, Anna Triandafyllidou Modern Greece: a profile of a strained identity, Nikos Kokosalakis and Iordanis Psimmenos Nation, state and national identity in modern Hungary, PaszkA!l Kiss and GyA rgy Hunyady Czech Republic: nation formation and Europe, Karel KubiA!, Vlasta KubiA!ovA!, KarolA-na RuzickovA!, and Michael VorA-A!ek Europe and the formation of the Polish state, nation, and national identity, Krystyna Romaniszyn Index.

The previous chapter has examined the important role food plays at the nation-state level and the ways in which the state uses food in its attempts to control, modernise and homogenise the nation. It also showcased the close relationship between the state’s domestic political, social and economic policies and its intervention in the nation’s diet. However, the relationship between food and nationalism and its importance to the nation-state extends far beyond the borders of the state. Food is not only used for domestic purposes and as an internal and banal symbol of the nation; it is also used internationally by the state in its diplomatic engagements and as a form of soft power, often referred to as gastrodiplomacy. In this regard, national food can be seen as exhibiting a duality; on the one hand, it can be used to indicate the attractiveness of the nation and increase its appeal, while, on the other hand, it can also be seen as a ‘contested medium of cultural politics that demarcates national boundaries and identities’ (DeSoucey, 2010: 433). This means that what is viewed as national food items or traditions can be used in branding and marketing the nation internationally, but this might also require state intervention and protection from foreign claims. In other words, national food is viewed by the state as a resource that can be utilised to accomplish a variety of aims but that also needs to be secured.

The previous chapter finished with a question: when there is contestation of values over cuisine, food culture and diet, who would or should be the arbiter? When there is an international dispute, the first candidates for such a position are usually international organisations. At the one end of the scale, there is a range of international conventions and treaties such as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, widely known as the genocide convention, as rule books on how individuals, groups and states should behave, and on the other there are mechanisms through which these rules are implemented, such as the International Criminal Court. In this context, international organisations assume the role of a judge in determining if any crime has been committed, and if so who the perpetrator is and what the punishment should be. Consequently, these international organisations in their efforts to deliver global justice are often seen as independent actors and a restraining factor on the nation-state and other entities; in other words, international organisations are understood to be the suppressors of nationalism and the imposers of global/universal norms and standards. However, in the area with which the current volume is concerned, food, rather than imposing what is deemed to be global or universal standards, international organisations appear to be unwittingly used by the nation-state and other entities in the promotion of national identity or nationalism. This may well be one of the consequences of the spread and permeation of neo-liberalism in reference to culture, as Scher (2010) argues, but the impact of neo-liberalism unfortunately falls outside the scope of this volume.

The chapter investigates the ways in which the nation is created, given meaning and maintained by everyday/banal acts of cooking, talking about and consuming food. The chapter pursues its aim by exploring the parameters of everyday nationalism, in particular talking and choosing the nation, and through the case study of Japanese-style pasta. In this case study, the creation, revision and maintenance of ‘Japaneseness’ are examined, with data collected from two recipe sites to which interested members of the public submit their recipes for collective evaluation without explicit commercial motive. By analysing the ways in which the Japaneseness of Japanese-style pasta is constructed, claimed and evaluated, the chapter charts the process of making a foreign food item — pasta — into an item which is widely recognised as Japanese through the accumulative participation of ordinary people. The chapter seeks to illuminate the ways in which everyday actions of the individual reinforce the dominant idea of the nation as well as contest the official version, leading to an emergence of an alternative view.