In the 1890s, many observers at home and abroad discovered that Japan had finally entered the mainstream of world history and had indeed become a principal actor in that history. As Okuma Shigenobu remarked at the end of the Sino-Japanese War, “Japan is no longer a Japan for Japan, but a Japan for the world.” Although some Japanese viewed the end of their cultural and political isolation as cause for unrestrained self-congratulation, others were ambivalent about its implication for the future. If Japan became more like other modern nations, its material and political development might continue, but only at the expense of social harmony or cultural integrity. As the country moved into a new century, there was uncertainty over the shape of Japan's future.

One vision of the future saw Japan as eternally unique, able to maintain its traditional culture and values even in the midst of rapid economic and political change. This point of view, which we might call the “particularist” or “exceptionalist” perspective, found champions in the Seikyosha writers of the early 1890s, who urged that the nation's cultural essence (kokusui) be preserved in the march toward modernity.’ Given the polychromatic character of Japan's cultural past, however, it was difficult to identify this cultural essence. Unlike China, which boasted of an easily identifiable great tradition, Japan had none. Where, then, were the Seikyosha writers to find the kokusui – in the myths and legends of the Shinto tradition, in the sensibilities of Heian culture, in the harsh ethos of the warrior class, in the boisterous arts of the Tokugawa townsmen, or in the austere puritanism of Tokugawa Confucianism?