Conservatism as Modernism: The Aesthetics of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In Praise of Shadows in Global Context

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press

The English philosopher Roger Scruton observes that conservative thinkers who attempt to define and defend “conservatism” often find themselves trapped in a paradox. To the extent that they succeed in making their points through reason and argument, they ironically end up contradicting the conservative way of living in the world, which is supposed to be intuitive, unconscious, and natural, rather than reasoned, self-conscious, and philosophical. After all, Scruton writes, the classic tradition of “English conservatism is rooted in the patrimony of the English upper class, in the quiet common sense of the old English constitution and in the plain-man unassuming practices that are, in the life of an English Tory, a handy substitute for thinking.”[1] Scruton’s point is that conservatives distrust intellectual abstraction and grand theory as ways of making sense of the world, instead defining themselves and their times with reference to the realm of lived experience as it manifests in the “patrimony” of the “upper class,” the “common sense” of custom and tradition, and the collective wisdom that guides “unassuming practices” in everyday life, sparing the individual the burdens of independent reasoning. In this view, conservatism is a way of living in the world as it is, rather than thinking about the world as it could or should be.

None of this will come as a surprise to readers of conservative thought, who have encountered versions of Scruton’s argument in numerous contexts. But what stands out in Scruton’s rumination on conservatism more starkly is his claim that the desire to live in the world as it is rather than to change it into what we imagine it could be is what makes conservatism the modernist frame of mind par excellence. In an essay on the prominent modernist poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot, who has long been read as a conservative, Scruton reflected on the paradox “that our greatest modernist should also be our greatest modern conservative” (Scruton, Political Philosophy, 194). He explained that although modernism in literature and thought is usually associated with the avant-garde who self-consciously break from the past as they attempt to create something radically new, Eliot’s conservatism was in fact a more meaningful form of modernism because Eliot engaged the modern world of “fragmentation, heresy and unbelief” as given, attempting to live within its contradictions rather than trying to transcend them (194). Scruton concluded that in so doing, Eliot revealed that “conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success. What distinguishes [the classic conservative thinker Edmund] Burke from the French revolutionaries [whom he famously criticized in Reflections on the Revolution in France] is not his attachment to things past, but his desire to live fully in the present, to understand it in all its imperfections, and to accept it as the only reality that is offered to us” (194). With this, Scruton radically reorients our understanding of conservatism in modern times: rather than thinking of “conservatism” as a backward-looking form of nostalgia attached to an idealized past that can never be recovered, he suggests that conservatism is in fact a bold form of modernism that sets aside the utopian alternatives conjured by intellectual abstraction in order to live within the constraints and imperfections of “the only reality that is offered to us.”

This article argues that reading conservatism as a form of modernism provides a comparative frame in which to see how early twentieth-century writers around the globe converged on a shared set of principles for what might be called a “conservative aesthetics,” or a conservative notion of beauty and meaning that they hoped would redeem a modern world of “heresy and unbelief” from its self-perpetuating nihilism. This approach takes inspiration from the scholar Christos Hadjiyiannis’s study of conservative modernism in England, which shows how Eliot and other conservative writers numbered among the many modernists against modernity who rebelled against the industrialization of culture, the atomization of the individual, and the demise of earlier forms of community in a modern age of reason.[2] Hadjiyiannis examines conservative writers who carved out a distinctive niche within the expansive modernist milieu by advocating for elevated cultural values in what they viewed as a degraded modern world. In this context, conservatism gave modernists “a political framework for upholding their deep-rooted conviction in the extraordinary power of the few over the many and it accommodated their longing for some fabled time when artists were recognised as playing an important role in society” (Hadjiyiannis, Conservative Modernists, xi).

This article expands the scope of inquiry by putting prominent literary conservatives from the North Atlantic world who are already well known as modernists—including Eliot, the English poet T. E. Hulme, and the Southern Agrarian writers in America who are best known for their volume of essays I’ll Take My Stand (1930)—into dialogue with the conservative modernism expressed by the Japanese novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in his noted essay on Japanese aesthetics In Praise of Shadows (In’ei raisan, 1933). In the analysis that follows, I will argue that although Tanizaki’s rumination on beauty, tradition, and order announces itself as an inquiry into uniquely Japanese problems, it in fact engages global concerns that motivated the emergence of a multidimensional literary conservatism around the globe in the early twentieth century. This comparative approach reveals how the seemingly unrelated perspectives of writers in Japan, America, and England ironically overflowed “the only reality that [was] offered to [them]” in their own respective contexts, and came into confluence at the point where core questions about how to “live fully in the present” of the modern world contributed to a common concept of conservative aesthetics. By exploring the two-way dialogue between concepts and contexts, then, we begin to see how the keyword “conservatism”—which has most often been understood with reference to the intellectual life of the North Atlantic world—can explain aspects of Japanese modernism that have previously gone undertheorized, while at the same time helping us grasp how Tanizaki’s noted essay on Japanese aesthetics can enrich our collective conversation about the global dynamics of conservatism writ large.   

The analysis that follows sustains the comparison among vastly different writers in radically different contexts by observing that in all cases, conservative modernists around the globe shared not only a common perception of the problems that beset the modern world, but also the common burden of somehow working through the contradictions that inevitably followed from their own conservative positions. For as they measured their affectionate attachment to tradition against their melancholic feeling that its suasive power was in decline, they also navigated the irony that their own elitist desire to lead their contemporaries to a higher cultural ground inevitably contradicted their preoccupation with “plain-man” common sense and their populist appeal to what Burke once called “untaught feelings.”[3] Rather than resolving these contradictions with logic, though, the conservative modernists made an aesthetics out of them as they argued that the beauty of tradition could awaken ordinary readers to an intuitive way of being in the world that had been lost in the modern age of reason. By exploring the paradoxes through which conservative writers thought about the modern world in the aesthetic terms of beauty and meaning, then, we ultimately come to realize that their greatest ambition was not to think about anything at all. Instead, it was to leave the realm of intellect behind in favor of traditional structures of meaning that were so intuitively appealing—whatever their contradictions—that they presented “a handy substitute for thinking” altogether. 

After tracing the different routes by which writers around the globe arrived at the aesthetic dimension of the conservative mind, the final section of the article considers how the conservative attraction to beauty emerged in dialectical relation to darker conservative sentiments that were more paranoid, xenophobic, and prejudiced. This section argues that as the conservative modernists of the early twentieth century identified their objects of affection, they just as ardently identified objects of derision in the form of intrusive outsiders whom they held responsible for destroying the social orthodoxy and sense of order that they cherished most of all. To make this point, the end of the article examines how Tanizaki’s nativism and Eliot’s well-known antisemitism articulated the xenophobic streak that has long characterized one of the most problematic elements of conservative thought.[4] By balancing the pleasures of order that conservative modernists found in beauty against the prejudice that stained (and sustained) their most polemical social commentaries, the article ultimately composites a picture of a conservative dialectic in which the concerns of aesthetics and those of politics each informed the other.

Objects of Conservative Affection

In a modern world in which conservative writers believed that language was fast becoming unmoored from experience and “swing[ing] right along to the infinite nothing,” as Hulme once put it, “the task of the artistic modernist,” in Scruton’s paraphrase of Eliot, was “to find the words, rhythms and artistic forms that would make contact again with our experience—not my experience, or yours, but our experience—the experience that unites us as living here and now.”[5] One of the most notable expressions of the conservative modernists’ desire to recuperate a more meaningful collective language in the midst of its modern disintegration was their turn to the explanatory power of the essay form, where they translated the cultural elitism that led them to believe that they were the standard bearers of a fallen age into a more accessible pedagogy by which to teach ordinary readers about the orderly—and ordering—virtues of the conservative view of language, literature, culture, and art. 

Eliot is the most notable example of a conservative modernist who assumed the position of pedagogue: although best known as a virtuosic poet, he was also a teacher himself who taught working-class students in early twentieth-century London and later channeled his classroom lessons into some of his best-known works of literary criticism.[6] Scruton explains that as a teacher of the modern condition more broadly construed, Eliot believed that the crumbling of older aristocracies that had formerly been the standard bearers for literature and art had been followed in modern times by the rise of liberal democracies that were driven more often by the egalitarian fetish of majority rule than they were by the exalted virtues of “great books” and elite artistic traditions. In “The Idea of a Christian Society” (1939), for example, Eliot wrote that “the future of art and thought in a democratic society does not appear any brighter” than in any other society, and warned of “the steady influence which operates silently in any mass society organised for profit, for the depression of standards of art and culture.”[7] Eliot believed that these developments in the modern world placed a unique obligation on the part of the critic to bring clarity and precision to the language of a fallen age. That is why Scruton writes that Eliot’s literary and cultural criticism reflected his conviction that critics “must act to restore what the aristocratic ideal of taste would otherwise spontaneously generate—a language in which words are used with their full meaning, in order to show the world as it is, without veiling it in a mist of cliché-ridden sentiment” (Scruton, Political Philosophy, 201). 

Tanizaki is rarely read alongside Eliot, and it is easy to see why. For one thing, Tanizaki’s playful and even bawdy turns of mind would never comport with the stern and serious bearing of Eliot, and for another, religion played a central role in Eliot’s writing but almost none at all in Tanizaki’s critique of modernity. Without overwriting these differences, though, we should recognize that Tanizaki shared with conservative modernists around the globe the impulse to defend what he viewed as classic styles and sensibilities against their degradation in a modern world of increasing meaninglessness. Elsewhere, I have observed that at around the same time that Tanizaki wrote about Japanese aesthetics in In Praise of Shadows, he also set out to teach ordinary readers how to be good writers in A Manual of Style (Bunshō tokuhon, 1934), a pragmatic and pedagogical “manual” that materialized alongside Tanizaki’s 1939 translation of The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, eleventh century) into modern Japanese. I argued that taken together, In Praise of Shadows, A Manual of Style, and the modern Genji translation were all part of a distinctive pedagogy of Japanese vernacular style that set out to teach readers how to see what Tanizaki viewed as the natural strengths and weakness of the Japanese language in contexts ranging from everyday usage to the greatest classics.[8] By extension, it might be said that these texts engaged global conservative trends as they located the beauty of the Japanese language within what Tanizaki understood to be the natural constraints of its own grammatical structure, and the cultural constraints of its age-old contexts of usage. 

The conservative perspective that appears in Tanizaki’s interwar writings emerged from a longer history of nativist thought that traces its origins in modern Japan to the eighteenth-century trends in National Learning (kokugaku). Tanizaki himself engaged this history by mixing the aesthetic attraction to the poetics of the Japanese language for which the older nativist tradition is well known with the urbane sense of style that has long been associated with the culture of the Edo period in general.[9] As Tanizaki took inspiration from the past, moreover, he also formed his perspective in relation to unresolved questions about the fate of tradition in the modern world that were peculiar to his own time. 

Many of these questions arose in response to Meiji modernization in the late nineteenth century, a transitional era which, as the historian Kenneth Pyle has shown, witnessed the emergence of a modern conservatism in Japan.[10] Later, during the interwar years, the conservative streak of Japanese modernism was articulated in the literature and thought of a wide range of writers and thinkers in Japan—Tanizaki among them—who turned to the roots of Japanese tradition in search of models for order and orthodoxy capable of stabilizing what they believed to be a modern world destined for fragmentation.[11] Scholars have long observed that one of the ironies of interwar modernism in Japan was that as much as its nativist discourse promised to identify something uniquely Japanese, it also evoked core problems that troubled the modernist mind around the globe, from the decline of tradition and the dissolution of social order to the rise of industrialism and the threat of modern technology. For this reason, Japanese modernism has often been read alongside its counterparts in Europe as one distinctive part of a contemporaneous modernity, and scholars have amply shown how its interwar trajectory ultimately contributed to the virulent ideologies of nationalism and fascism that came to characterize the global 1930s writ large.[12]

Tanizaki occupied a central position within this modernist milieu. The author of the popular erotic novel Naomi (Chijin no ai, 1924) and a writer who participated in the emerging art of filmmaking in the 1920s, he is well known for his turn to tradition in the 1930s, when he penned several neoclassical novellas and praised the native aesthetics of the Japanese language.[13] Yet, while scholars of Japanese literature already know that nativism and nationalism are a central part of Tanizaki’s interwar oeuvre, only rarely have they interpreted his aesthetics in relation to the idea of “conservatism” per se.[14] This is partly attributable to the fact that many of Tanizaki’s best-known novels are risqué and provocative rather than conservative, to be sure, and partly because Tanizaki’s literary persona at times associated him in the public imagination with the image of a libertine playboy, rather than with that of a moralizing traditionalist. But the biggest reason that “conservatism” and Tanizaki have rarely been read together is that the keyword “conservatism” itself appears only rarely in the corpus of English-language studies of Japanese literature in general, having received far less scholarly attention than adjacent terms in the lexicon of interwar cultural criticism like “modernism,” “nationalism,” and “fascism,” all of which have been amply studied and debated. Against this backdrop, theorizing Tanizaki’s conservative side promises to enhance our understanding of a prominent Japanese modernist at the same time that it broadens our understanding of conservatism in global context by shifting the point of focus to a Japanese idiom that formed in deep dialogue with the modernist metropoles of the North Atlantic, and yet remained peripheral to their centers of power and at times became antagonistic toward their unexamined Eurocentrism. 

In Praise of Shadows throws these dynamics into high relief because the essay explicitly contrasts East and West even as it implicitly advances a set of modernist and conservative concerns that were widely shared by Tanizaki’s contemporaries. In simplest terms, the main argument of the essay is that Japanese civilization produced an aesthetic of shadows over the centuries that unites the Japanese people in an unconscious but consistent preference for the darkened over the luminescent, the subtle over the explicit, the allusive over the crystal clear. The broader implication of the essay is that the Japanese attunement to shadows harmonizes with the imperfections of nature and society alike, and contrasts with the progressive desire to improve or even perfect things as they are. Tanizaki remarks throughout the essay on how the unifying aesthetic of shadows has been damaged in modern times by the influx of new technologies like the electric light bulb and the loudspeaker, which threaten to assimilate the traditional identity of the Japanese “national character” (kokuminsei) into an enlightened and electrified modern era that ceaselessly seeks to augment and illuminate the world, rather than living in it as it is. The most obvious connection linking the broad strokes of In Praise of Shadows to the Anglo conservative tradition going back to Burke is that Tanizaki implicitly argues that although the Enlightenment ideals of progress, industry, and reason have produced great advancements and important innovations, they are nevertheless far more limited—and limiting—than their advocates usually acknowledge. It follows that his meditation on the authorless aesthetic of shadows that he argues developed naturally in the history of Japanese civilization reflects the sort of attunement to the imperfectible nature of both society and humanity that conservative thinkers from Burke onward have long discussed in Anglophone writings. 

Like other conservative modernists, Tanizaki makes his argument by positioning himself as an expert who will teach a form of cultivated taste to his non-expert reader. But his rhetorical strategies mitigate the off-putting effects of elitism by repeatedly claiming that the traditional aesthetic of darkness at the center of In Praise of Shadows originated in the ordinary “plain-man” context of Japanese daily life, only later rising to the more exalted spheres of artistic greatness. Shaped by the natural conditions of climate rather than the political conditions of ideology, and responding to the finitude of practical needs rather than the utopias of boundless desire, the aesthetic of shadows that Tanizaki argues unites Japanese civilization is so ordinary that it assumes the form of a comprehensive living art. This means that it expresses itself in the most practical features of Japanese dwellings, cuisine, and everyday life, rather than only in the greatest works of Japanese art alone.

By rooting the discussion of Japanese aesthetics in the unremarkable realm of daily life, Tanizaki presents an alternative to philosophies of art and beauty that separate aesthetics from the workaday concerns of ordinary human needs. In The Human Condition (1958), for example, the philosopher Hannah Arendt drew a sharp distinction between objects of art that are valued for their autonomous beauty and non-art objects like tools that are prized for their utility.[15] One of the implications that followed from this distinction was that a great work of art—such as a painting in a museum—is sheltered from the utilitarian demands of daily life in ways that separate the realm of art from the realm of non-art. In this view, a great work of art rises above the practical demands of everyday life because it is never used for any particular purpose, whereas objects that are made for use in daily life—like a hammer—are only valued for the work that they perform and the particular purposes that they serve as instruments, and therefore exist in a shallow logic of means and ends that never rises to the level of contemplation. The autonomous work of art assumes a more capacious kind of meaning because it is liberated from the utilitarian demands of everyday life, and therefore raises itself and the contemplative mind that engages it above the pragmatic ground of task mastering. 

To be sure, the notion of aesthetic autonomy that Arendt implies would indeed inspire conservative reflections on art and beauty in numerous contexts. But one of the distinctive features of In Praise of Shadows is how often Tanizaki praises the aesthetics of objects that have become enduring features of the material culture of Japanese daily life precisely because they fulfill particular needs. Tanizaki writes that utilitarian objects like a writing brush or a lacquerware bowl are shaped by the authorless force of time that adapted them for a particular purpose in a particular context. He suggests that in the conservative mind, these tangible and useful things that rarely rise to the level of aesthetic contemplation at all in fact articulate a form of collective wisdom that enables the Japanese people “to live fully in the present” without even thinking about it simply by making use of objects that live and work within the particular culture that shaped them, and that was in turn shaped by them. Working from this premise, In Praise of Shadows generates its momentum by engaging the dichotomy that has long opposed the realms of beauty and utility, and recasting their relationship as a dialectic in which each enhances the other.

The ultimate implication of Tanizaki’s philosophy of useful objects is that the objects he describes collectively produce—and reflect—the aesthetic sensibility that defines the Japanese “national character” itself. In this view, aesthetic sensibility becomes a form of common sense, or a feeling of intuitive attraction that is shared by everyone in a cohesive community rather than remaining the unique possession of elite artists and highbrow intellectuals alone. Tanizaki made this point in the course of explaining how particular objects of Japanese affection worked in reciprocal relation to Japanese sensibility so naturally that they guided the Japanese mind around the burdens of reason altogether, and toward a mode of intuition that offered “a handy substitute for thinking,” as Scruton put it. In one case, for example, he observed that writing with an ink stone and brush channeled the Japanese mind toward the affordances of the Japanese language, whereas using a modern fountain pen imported from abroad pushed the Japanese mind toward imitation of European ideas and tastes. Although ordinary objects like the ink stone and brush do not rise to the level of an autonomous work of art on their own, their dialectical intercourse with the Japanese mind produced a form of autonomy in the political sense of Japanese identity and unconquered sovereignty, distinguishing the Japanese “national character” from every other cultural identity around the globe.  

Like other conservatives, though, Tanizaki believed that the common sense of tradition that allowed particular cultural objects to structure an autonomous national identity was threatened in the modern world by the progressive intrusions of industrialization. Specifically, Tanizaki believed that the enemies of the form-giving and sense-making tradition of shadows in Japan were imported technological innovations such as the electric light bulb and the fountain pen, which were inarguably more convenient than their antecedents (lamp light and ink brush), and for that very reason, destined to replace the objects of affection that had long defined Japan’s traditional material culture. The problem as Tanizaki saw it was that unlike the objects of traditional material culture in Japan that formed in dialogue with the Japanese sensibility that created them, imported commodities from abroad maximized utility for its own sake without any concern for aesthetics, and therefore disrupted the organic dialectic that had previously bonded Japanese subjects to Japanese objects in earlier times. 

Tanizaki introduces this conflict between the native and the foreign at the outset of In Praise of Shadows by describing the impossibility of integrating modern conveniences into the domestic architecture of an ordinary Japanese home. He writes in the first lines of the essay: “What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms—even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn.”[16] He goes on to describe his own struggle to build a Japanese home with both traditional Japanese architecture and modern technological conveniences imported from abroad, remarking at length on the incongruities between the native and the foreign. As the essay unfolds, Tanizaki gradually transforms the physical structure of the Japanese home into an allegory for the Japanese mind, each of which, he implies, was fast becoming a tangled jumble of native and foreign elements with no unifying principle to structure them. This indicates that the essay is more than a meditation on Japanese aesthetics; it is also a meditation on the conservative desire for order in a modern world that seems to conspire against it. 

Minority Cultures

Although the conflict between East and West at the center of In Praise of Shadows explains why it has usually been interpreted as a nationalistic critique of foreign influence on Japanese tradition, its deeper preoccupations with cultural difference in the age of industrialization construct a subtler web of connections that implicitly link Tanizaki’s rumination on Japanese aesthetics to a global conservative imagination that rebelled against the intrusions of “progress” and “Enlightenment.” These conservative critiques sometimes sought to protect “minority” cultures in particular, including not only non-Western societies like Japan, but threatened regions in the United States like the postbellum South, too. 

Most notably, modernist writers in the American South during the 1930s—including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren—described their unease with industrial modernity and its threat to Southern sensibilities in I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of essays published around the same time as In Praise of Shadows.[17] In the “Statement of Principles” that introduces I’ll Take My Stand, the authors collectively declare that “the South is a minority section that has hitherto been jealous of its minority right to live its own kind of life,” later adding that “there are many other minority communities opposed to industrialism, and wanting a much simpler economy to live by.”[18] This suggests that while Tanizaki’s reaction against the dark side of industrialization differed in many regards from that of the Southern Agrarians—unlike his American counterparts, after all, Tanizaki was a cosmopolitan urbanite rather than any sort of “agrarian”—it is also true that modernist confrontations with industrial progress formed one of the central threads of conservative aesthetics on both sides of the interwar Pacific. 

Exploring this dynamic, we begin to see how Tanizaki’s perspective in In Praise of Shadows resonated with that of the Southern Agrarians in their lament that the most deleterious effect of industrialization was its destruction of a gentler aesthetic sensibility that found in art, nature, and social life alike a more humane way for people to engage each other and their world. In their “Statement of Principles,” the Southern Agrarians wrote that “the arts” have never had a “proper life under industrialism, with the general decay of sensibility which attends it. Art depends, in general, like religion, on a right attitude to nature; and in particular on a free and disinterested observation of nature that occurs only in leisure” (Ransom, “Statement of Principles,” xlvii). This would suggest that in the conservative view, a mind at leisure is a mind unburdened by the labor of thought, and a mind which finds itself in intuitive communion with the beauty of art and nature, rather than busied by the contrivances of reason. For the Southern Agrarians, moreover, the state of leisure in which one properly perceives the beauty of nature and art also produced the state of mind in which the sympathetic bonds of community materialize in everyday social relations, allowing traditional societies to form and thrive through shared sensibilities unbroken by the partisan ideologies of politics. It followed that in the conservative view, the demise of both art and community in the age of industrialization reflected the disintegration of a comprehensive aesthetic sensibility that orders the lived experience of “human affairs” in every “section.”

Ransom made this point explicitly in his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand by reflecting on the intuitive bonds in the South that united the community through common sense. He observed that the aesthetic sensibility of the South was attuned most of all to the ordinary realm of everyday life, finding beauty in appealing forms of dress, speech, and manners, all of which, he held, made the South a “section” with a distinctive identity. In this view, “art” was a matter of social life more than of creative genius. That is why Ransom wrote that “the arts of the section [the South], such as they were, were not immensely passionate, creative, and romantic; they were the eighteenth-century social arts of dress, conversation, manners, the table, the hunt, politics, oratory, the pulpit. These were arts of living and not arts of escape; they were also community arts, in which every class of society could participate after its kind.”[19] Ransom believed that the shared aesthetic sensibility that united “the arts of the section” ultimately made the traditional social life of the South into something of an unassuming art form, writing that “the South took life easy, which is itself a tolerably comprehensive art” (“Reconstructed But Unregenerate,” 12). According to Ransom, then, the leisurely connections formed by intuition in the South bonded communities through unconscious but inarguable feelings of attraction that were powerful precisely because they were common.

Tanizaki’s ruminations on Japanese cuisine, architecture, and writing implements similarly inform his opinion that the familiar features of traditional culture in Japan bring a sense of calm to Japanese people, transforming daily life itself into a “comprehensive art,” as Ransom had it, and allowing Japanese people to “[take] life easy.” Where Tanizaki writes about the virtues of Japanese bathrooms in In Praise of Shadows, for example, he describes the dark recesses of the Japanese style in contrast to the glimmering white surfaces of Western porcelain, noting (in Thomas Harper’s and Edward Seidensticker’s translation) that “the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose,” or, less elegantly translated, “truly made to be a place where one’s spirit [seishin] can be at ease [yasumaru]” (In Praise of Shadows, 3; In’ei raisan, 519). The opening section of the essay contrasts the sense of repose that Tanizaki finds in the aesthetic of shadows with the anxiety response that he says modern amenities like electricity, telephones, and heaters stir in the Japanese home and heart. He laments that any attempt to integrate these modern innovations into a traditional Japanese home inevitably appears as the excessive contrivances of a high-strung “neurotic” (shinkeishitsu), ironically calling attention to themselves rather than blending in (In’ei raisan, 517).  

In a modern world of “neurotic” agitation, Tanizaki believed that the time-honored beauty of darkness conduced by the familiarity of ordinary objects had the therapeutic effect of soothing the Japanese soul. At one point in In Praise of Shadows, Tanizaki makes this point by writing that jade is prized in Asia because of its dark and cloudy mysteriousness, explaining that whereas Westerners anxiously try to eradicate every speck of grime and dirt by polishing the surfaces of silverware to a perfect shine, Asians find beauty in the worn and faded patina of age that is the accidental effect of time rather than the intentional result of human designs:

I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize [bika] it. Yet for better or worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them. Living in these old houses among these old objects is in some mysterious way a source of peace and repose. (In Praise of Shadows, 11–12; In’ei raisan, 527–28)

What Harper and Seidensticker translate as “idealize” above appears in the Japanese original in a word that means “aestheticize” (bika), to view something as a form of beauty (bi); and what is translated as “a source of . . . repose” appears as something closer to “calms one’s nerves” (shinkei ga yasumaru). In these statements, too, Tanizaki identifies an aesthetic sensibility that lives in communion with the natural world and the inexorable flows of time, allowing objects like jade to become part of what Ransom called “arts of living and not arts of escape.”

The most important conclusion to be drawn from reading In Praise of Shadows in this comparative context is that for Tanizaki—as for Scruton and Ransom—“arts of living” mattered because living, as they variously spoke of it, presented an appealing alternative to thinking. In their conservative view, living meant inhabiting a particular cultural space and time without intervening against anything, whereas thinking implied the melioristic desire to redesign and ultimately to improve the world as we find it, often with the result of damaging time-honored cultural styles and replacing them with what Tanizaki called the excessive contrivances of a “neurotic.” Once we see that the link between art and life comprises the core of conservative modernism, it comes as no surprise that Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows is first and foremost a meditation on architecture, a utilitarian art form designed for the purpose of shelter and dwelling—which is to say, of living. “A sense for beauty can only develop from the actuality of life as we live it,” he wrote, “and for this reason, our ancestors, who had no choice but to live in dark rooms, were left to discover a form of beauty in shadows. In the end, they used shadows to create their own sense of beauty.”[20] Designed by the authorless force of time rather than the reasoned intentions of any individual, and responding to practical needs rather than utopian desires, the beauty of traditional architecture offers relief to the conservative mind in a modern world that demands far too much thinking at every turn.

The Aesthetics of Finitude

Although Tanizaki traces the origins of the Japanese national character to an aesthetic sensibility that emerged from the practical demands of daily life, his essay also identifies how the aesthetic of shadows appears in the more exalted realm of the Japanese arts. As In Praise of Shadows observes the traditional endowments of Japanese theater and literature in particular, it implies a critique of the modernist mainstream of the early twentieth century and the widely held belief that modern literature and art are most meaningful when they are creative and avant-garde, pushing boundaries and creating something radically new that breaks with the past. In the conservative perspective advanced by In Praise of Shadows, the avant-garde attitude toward art overstates the virtues of progress and the genius of the individual, forgetting that the greatest reservoirs of wisdom accumulate in cultures over centuries, rather than in the epiphanic moments of inspiration that lead creative individuals to radical “breakthroughs.” 

The implications of this perspective come to light in reading Tanizaki’s famous essay on Japanese aesthetics through the distinction that his conservative English counterparts drew in the early twentieth century between what they called “romantic” and “classical” aesthetics. Hadjiyiannis observes that the critique of industrial progress in the writings of conservative modernists in England produced a theory of meaning in literature and the arts that favored the rule-bound, finite, and structured aesthetics of “classicism,” as opposed to the utopian idea of open-ended creativity that they associated with “romanticism” (Conservative Modernists, 45–55). The conservative modernist poet T. E. Hulme wrote in the essay “Romanticism and Classicism” that “romanticism” named a perspective on life and art defined by a fetish for liberty and progress, which led writers and artists to disregard Original Sin and the inarguable limitations of human capacity that followed from it. Hulme declared: “Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress” (“Romanticism and Classicism,” 116). Hulme added that “one can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. [In the classical view,] Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him” (116). With this, Hulme reiterates the longstanding conservative position that the modern world has created a cult of the individual that overstates the virtues of revolution, liberation, and creativity. In response, Hulme counters that humanity is so flawed and limited that individuals in fact benefit greatly from the elevating influence of tradition, for whereas the isolated individual is prone to egregious errors of judgement and an exaggerated sense of self-importance, the guiding hand of tradition directs the individual to a higher order of meaning that has been refined throughout the ages.     

It followed from this that in the cultural realm of literature and art, the finite specificity of time-honored genres, conventional patterns of traditional expression, and enduring humanities questions of everlasting relevance were all believed to have the beneficial effect of elevating the individual writer and artist above their in-born limitations and the parochial horizons of their contemporary circumstances. Hulme held that the classicist proceeds from the premise that individuals are at their best when they think and act within the constraints of inherited tradition, with the greatest poets, writers, and artists developing what Hulme’s contemporary Eliot famously called “the historical sense” that bonds their “individual talent” to the cumulative wisdom of their culture.[21] Hulme lamented that in contrast, the romantic utopians’ love of creative liberty amounted to “a bad metaphysic of art.  [They] are unable to admit the existence of beauty without the infinite being in some way or another dragged in” (Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” 128). In this conservative view, the romantic faith in creativity ironically degrades the realm of literature and art by disconnecting it from the inarguable constraints that frame human experience, and forcing it into a virtual reality that is nothing but the artist’s own utopian contrivance.

This explains why in Hulme’s view, the classicist is drawn to poetry and other objects of aesthetic contemplation that are “dry” and “hard,” embodying (rather than transcending) the material, contextual, and epistemological limitations that the classicist believes constrain all human endeavors. In putting the matter this way, Hulme provides a provocative vocabulary for appreciating Tanizaki’s interest in particular objects throughout In Praise of Shadows, for although the essay ultimately revolves around shadowy depths that are the opposite of hard-edged, it often traces their formation to concrete objects and cultural contexts that collectively impose a “dry” and “hard” structure for the Japanese perception of beauty in art and life to materialize. Even in the more exalted realms of theater and literature, which might appear at first glance to be spaces of creativity and experiment, Tanizaki observes that the structuring force of tradition is an elevating influence that nevertheless constrains Japanese expression. He claims that the Noh actor on stage animates a theatrical tradition refined over the ages to show the Japanese body to greatest advantage, for example, and calls for a modern literature aligned with Japan’s native tradition of shadows. Rather than embracing the boundlessness of what Hulme called “romanticism,” then, Tanizaki’s focus on the constraints of tradition implied a “classicist” conservatism attracted to what might be called the aesthetics of finitude, or the beauty and meaning that cohere within the limitations of cultural context.

Undissociated Sensibility

The “classicist” perspective described above was one part of a broader conservative attempt to recuperate what the literary critic Monroe Spears once called “undissociated sensibility.” In Dionysus and The City: Modernism in Twentieth-Century Poetry (1970), Spears wrote with reference to the Southern Agrarians that “the essential datum that is the basis of their modernism” might be called “psychological dissociation of sensibility,” explaining that in a modern world whose signal sensations are “liberation” and “disinheritance,” the origin of Southern Agrarian modernism was the search for a more coherent “Unity of Being, for the undissociated sensibility” (195). Spears explained that the global feeling of dissociation that emerged with industrial modernity was, for the Southern Agrarians, compounded by regionally-specific feelings of tragic defeat and dispossession, such that “like Yeats in Ireland, Faulkner in another part of the American South, and other occasional products of poor, defeated, and culturally backward societies, they [Ransom, Tate, and Warren] had a profound sense of the past and of history, a hatred of abstraction, and an awareness of tragedy” (153). The same could be said for Tanizaki, whose sense that Japan was losing its battle with the Anglo-West endowed In Praise of Shadows with “an awareness of tragedy” as strong as that of his Southern Agrarian contemporaries. 

In Tanizaki’s case, the search for “undissociated sensibility” in a modern world divided by the sensations of “liberation” and “disinheritance” prompted him to seek the origins of the Japanese attraction to shadows in order to rehabilitate its unifying force for a depleted present, writing:

We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle light to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow. (In Praise of Shadows, 31; In’ei raisan, 547)

As Tanizaki locates the origins of Japanese shadows in a conservative connection to nature, he identifies what Spears called the “undissociated sensibility” in which the perceiving subject communes with the world as it is, linking the allure of nature to the constructs of culture in a harmonious and comprehensive worldview. For Tanizaki, this was the highest calling of the aesthetic imagination: to make sense of the world by unifying subject and object, nature and culture, utility and beauty, past and present.

As Tanizaki contrasts the Japanese sensibility with that of its progressive Western counterpart in the statement above, though, he also reminds us that while conservatives have often praised themselves for cultivating an “undissociated sensibility” that tolerates the imperfections of the world as it is, their own capacity for tolerance is ironically limited by a rigid insistence on cultural consensus that can turn the conservative into a xenophobe. Far from remaining in “undissociated” connection to an increasingly integrated modern world, conservative modernists have sometimes become dogmatic in attacking anything—and anyone—that “dissociates” them from their cherished ideals. That is why conservatives have long been known for what the historian Richard Hofstadter once called “the paranoid style,” by which he meant a style of thought and argumentation that does not accommodate itself to the world as it is at all, but instead does battle with it. Hofstadter explained that conservatives’ anger and paranoia originate in the feeling that history is not going their way: he wrote in 1964 that the defining feature of “the modern right wing” in American politics is that it “feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”[22]

Feelings of “dispossession” lead some conservatives to accuse alien intruders of destroying the homogeneity of their “traditional” societies, polluting the “undissociated sensibility” that they idealize with foreign influence that ultimately threatens “the final destructive act of subversion” that would once and for all sever the conservative mind from its native objects of affection. Reacting to these perceived threats has turned otherwise eloquent conservative modernists into polemicists. In After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), for example, Eliot acknowledged that “in even the very best living tradition there is always a mixture of good and bad, and much that deserves criticism,” but he also insisted that there were limits to how much heterogeneity the conservative modernist could tolerate in their traditional society, writing that for order to prevail, “[t]he population should be homogenous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”[23] The intolerance expressed in Eliot’s antisemitic remark reminds us that conservatives who have touted their own tolerance for imperfection have often struggled against the seeming disorder of an increasingly integrated modern world that leaves them feeling “dispossessed” of an idealized form of “undissociated sensibility” at every turn.

For Tanizaki, too, the paranoid desire to protect Japan’s sensuous civilization of shadows from the luminescent intrusions of the Anglo-West became a matter of race, for in his eyes, the most important expression of Japan’s shadow aesthetics was the non-white complexion of the Japanese body. He wrote that the preference for darkness in Japan originated in the wisdom of the ancients who found in their own non-white bodies a form of dark beauty, observing that even in an ancient age when Japanese people could not have known that there existed a whiter race in the West, it was still true that the Japanese complexion naturally guided the ancients’ intuitive understanding of color by creating an affinity for darkened environments that suited their complexion. The racial origins of the Japanese preference for shadows prompted Tanizaki to express his sympathy with “people of color” (yūshokujinshu) elsewhere in the world, too, all of whom, he argued, were threatened with domination by the white races who treated them as enemy aliens (In’ei raisan, 548). 

American history provided Tanizaki with the most instructive case studies of why the “white races” would never accept anyone other than their own kind. He noted that in the time of the American Civil War, white Americans hunted down anyone with even a drop of black blood in their family lineage, concluding that this history of racial persecution and paranoid desire to rid the white world of Black bodies meant that “not even mixed race people [konketsuji] who at a glance were indistinguishable from pure-blooded whites, but among whose ancestors two or three generations earlier there had been a Black relative, escaped the searching gaze, no matter how faint the tinge that lay hidden beneath their white skin” (In Praise of Shadows, 32, translation modified; In’ei raisan, 548). Tanizaki also observed that even in more peaceful contexts, such as ordinary social gatherings in America, the presence of “colored” (yūshokujin) bodies aggravated the white Western mind, such that a “neurotic” (shinkeishitsu) white person could only be ill at ease if even one or two “people of color” (yūshokujinshu) were present (In’ei raisan, 548). In Tanizaki’s eyes, these sorts of “neurotic” responses to intrusive aliens attested to the “psychology [shinri]” that “caused the white races to reject the colored races” (In Praise of Shadows, 32; In’ei raisan, 548).

The racial violence that Tanizaki discusses in the American context informed the urgency of his writing about the conflict that he perceived between a dark-skinned Japanese civilization and the luminescent hegemony of the white West. Most threatening of all for Tanizaki were the casts of mind imported from the West that he believed acted as the intangible corollaries to the physical antagonisms that whites perpetrated on non-whites in America. Specifically, Tanizaki sensed that Western thought hegemonized the Japanese mind by spreading what he viewed as the false universalisms of the Enlightenment under the seemingly inarguable rubrics of modern science and technology:

Suppose for instance that we [in Japan] had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our industrial art—would they not have suited our national temper [kokuminsei] better than they do? In fact, our conception of physics itself, and even the principles of chemistry, would probably differ from that of Westerners; and the facts we are now taught concerning the nature and function of light, electricity, and atoms might well have presented themselves in different form. (In Praise of Shadows, 7; In’ei raisan, 523)

In this view, the intrusions from abroad that dissociated sensibility in Japan had assumed their most potent form as agents of imagination that severed the time-honored intuition of the Japanese from its organic roots, leaving the Japanese dispossessed of their own national character.

The conclusion of In Praise of Shadows urges readers to rehabilitate the “undissociated sensibility” of shadows by rebelling against the intellectual tutelage of the Anglo-West in particular, and the tyranny of intellect in general. Tanizaki writes: “I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing” in the hopes that there might yet remain one cultural arena in which “we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them” (In Praise of Shadows, 42; In’ei raisan, 557). With this, the last lines of the essay call for a conscious return to what had long been an unconscious aesthetic intuition. For as Eliot wrote in After Strange Gods: “I hold—in summing up—that a tradition is rather a way of feeling and acting which characterises a group throughout generations; and that it must largely be, or that many of the elements in it must be, unconscious” (31, emphasis in original). Like Eliot, then, Tanizaki believed that “[t]radition may be conceived as a by-product of right living, not to be aimed at directly,” as Eliot put it. “It is of the blood, so to speak, rather than of the brain: it is the means by which the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present” (32). However paradoxically, Tanizaki’s last lesson to his reader is to live a life that needs no teacher—a life that is of the blood rather than of the brain, and to discover through the “by-product[s] of right living” all the beauty of an undesigned world that cannot “be aimed at directly” through thought.

Conclusion

By reading In Praise of Shadows alongside the roughly contemporaneous writings of conservative modernists in England and America, we begin to see how the power of the conservative ethos activates in the cultural domain where art and ideas meet. The foregoing analysis would suggest that the prominence of culture in conservative thought should come as no surprise, if only because conservatives themselves from Burke to Tanizaki and beyond have encouraged their interlocutors to move from the domain of reasoned argumentation and logical consistency into the more sensuous cultural quarters of imagination and aesthetic attraction. In the realm of sensibility rather than of argument, the shadowy architecture of conservatism allows its logical contradictions and paradoxical contortions to fade into what its allies perceive to be an undissociated connection with their cherished ideals. Where the lights of reason dim and the glimmer of enchantment returns to a modern world that conspires against it at every turn, the politics of conservatism live through an aesthetic imagination that thrives on paradox and irony as much as on beauty.