A growing body of theoretical and historical work on the modern nation state and on its attendant nationalist ideologies and discourses has made us increasingly aware over the past two decades of the ‘constructed’ nature of national cultures and of the sacrifice of regional cultures often involved in the assertion of the nation state's hegemony. Japan seems a particularly clear case in point: before 1868 its body politic was a loose federation of several hundred feudal domains, each with its own more or less distinctive history, traditions and cultural identity – in other words, a heterogeneity of cultures making for a strong sense of regional autonomy. After 1868 a policy of cultural homogenization accompanied and facilitated the policy of political unification and centralization imposed by the new Tokyo government. Of course, tensions between centre and periphery in Japan did not begin in 1868: since the Yamato clan first imposed its rule over other clans in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, such tensions have been a central dialectic of Japanese history. But there is a significant difference after 1868: using all the institutions and technologies of modernity, the Meiji government initiated a process of political and cultural integration and homogenization that was unprecedented in its totality. Never before in Japanese history had the balance of power tilted so overwhelmingly onto the side of the central government and the central cultural establishment. And, thus, never before had regional cultures been so thoroughly marginalized and even threatened with extinction. To take one obvious example, a modified form of the Tokyo dialect became ‘standard Japanese’ and all other dialects became marginalized as ‘regional dialects’, soon to be consigned to the realm of the humorously quaint, folksy and old-fashioned, the language of old people but not of ambitious youth.

Again, of course, Japan is not alone in this – it is often compared to Italy and Germany as another ‘late-developing’ nation state, a product of late nineteenth-century imperial nationalism. But it was ‘latedeveloping’ only in comparison to West European and American models – in the Asian context Japan was a pioneer. Indeed, what makes Japan's case particularly striking is the fact that, because it was an Asian nation, and because its feudalistic social and political system survived until the mid-nineteenth century, its sudden ‘leap’ into modernity covered more ground in less time than that of any Western counterpart.