Research Project (Ongoing)

Soft Westernization and Hard Modernization: African Reflections on Meiji Japan

This research project proposes a comparative interpretation of two distinctive responses to the challenge of modernization: soft Westernization in Africa and hard modernization in Japan. Soft Westernization refers to a process in which Western cultural forms were more readily incorporated or absorbed than the productive and technological capacities underlying Western economic power. Hard modernization, by contrast, means a process in which Western technology and institutional practices were selectively acquired, adapted, and domesticated, ultimately generating indigenous productive capabilities. The project advances the hypothesis that the divergent developmental trajectories of Japan and Africa can be understood, in significant part, through these different forms of transformation generated by their encounters with the West.

One enduring puzzle of modern world history is why societies outside the West experienced such different trajectories of modernization. Much of Africa encountered Western modernity through colonialism and conquest. Japan, by contrast, constitutes a distinctive case of relatively autonomous modernization, achieved without colonial subordination or wholesale cultural displacement. Yet both Japan and Africa faced the growing power of the West and were exposed to Western ideas, technologies, and institutions at about the same time. The crucial difference, this research argues, lies not simply in the extent of Western influence but in what each society was able, or permitted, to do with that influence.

The project therefore examines Japan’s prewar economic transformation, with particular emphasis on the Meiji period (1868–1912), as a comparative lens for reconsidering Africa’s historical experience. It asks why much of colonial and postcolonial Africa developed forms of Westernization that did not generate comparable technological and productive capabilities, while Meiji Japan transformed external knowledge into indigenous capacities.

This research also closely examines how Meiji intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi debated learning from the West and compares the exchanges with those of postcolonial African thinkers, including the Ethiopian-born Kebede Michael and Kenyan-born Ali A. Mazrui. It then considers what the Meiji experience reveals about Africa’s historical constraints and missed opportunities.

In short, our research project asks: How did Meiji Japan learn from the West? How was colonial Africa taught by the West? What consequences followed from this asymmetry? And why was postcolonial Africa unable to correct it?