The Battlefield of Criticism: Kobayashi Hideo and Self-Consciousness in Modern Japan 1930s-1950s

The Battlefield of Criticism: Kobayashi Hideo and Self-Consciousness in Modern Japan 1930s-1950s
In the history of modern Japanese literature, Kobayashi Hideo is more than a writer of works; he is a critic who defined the thinking of his time. His criticism went beyond literary evaluation to shape the framework of perception of how modern Japanese understood themselves and the world.

In the 1930s, amidst depression and political unrest, Japanese society was losing faith in rationalism and progressive history. Kobayashi argued that we should return to a fundamental awareness of feeling and believing, rather than ideology and philosophy, and developed a critique that went into the interior of specific works.

During the war, Kobayashi did not criticize the state or the war directly, but he refused to process history through rational explanations or moral condemnation, and he took an attitude of accepting what he did not understand without understanding it.

Kobayashi Hideo's unusual persistence is seen in the fact that he did not change his narrative after the war's defeat, did not easily fall back on the language of democracy and progress, and continued to question the very self-consciousness of modernity itself.

His criticism does not offer correct answers, but demands that the individual stand alone in front of his works and history. For Kobayashi Hideo, criticism is an endless battlefield that continually tests one's sense of self in the midst of the times.