This paper analyzes contradictory readings of Japan as a modernist utopia, as seen in early Western moderns, such as the Impressionists and post-Impressionists (Monet, Van Gogh) and the Hegelian philosophers (Fenellosa, Kojeve), continuing on through noted artists/ critics (Eisenstein, Pound, Barthes), as one culture's traditional arts were translated into another's avant-garde. Depending upon ideology, "Japan" was read as a premodern culture to emulate (transnational postmodernism) or overcome (feudal vestige), thereby indicating an inherently schizophrenic condition of modernity itself. As a society which did not experience the direct exercise of Western imperialism, Japan has appeared in the Orientalist imagination as a hermetic integrity provoking both fascination and anxiety.

I will look closely at the construction of Japanese national culture as a site of aesthetic utopia in the work of Japan's premier modern poet, Hagiwara Sakutarô (1886-1942). Just as "progressive" Western artists and intellectuals sought to overcome the epistemological and aesthetic dead-ends within their own traditions, Hagiwara as a Japanese Romantics, imagined "Japan" as a utopic cure, in an overcoming of modernity.

In the 1930s, inspired by Hagiwara Sakutarô's call to "return to Japan", the Japanese Romantics assembled critical arguments and poetic artifacts, informed by a Schopenhauerian notion of artistic will as synonymous with national spirit. Japanese modernity, no longer understood in terms of material equivalence alone (equally industrialized, rationalized), was trans-formed into a spiritual project of overcoming the modern and the West through the nostalgic construction of a cultural essence.