THERE MAY NEVER have been an era in which people did not regard their own world as modern; for the very word “modern,” at its elementary level, simply connotes what Webster refers to as new-fashioned or up to date. In ancient Babylon, for example, modernity meant hanging gardens and arbitrary rule. In first-century China, it signified civil service exams and the writing of history and poetry. Thirteenth-century Mongolia saw the modern man as one who exhibited great skill in military horsemanship. And for the Japanese, modernity might variously have been defined as harmonious government, amorous gentility, or skill in the use of guns, depending on whether one lived in the age of Shōtoku Taishi, Genji, or Oda Nobunaga.

To be modern, in other words, is to be in tune with the basic themes and trends that mark one's own period of history as distinctive. Thus one might rephrase the question by asking: When did Japanese civilization begin to take on those special characteristics that can be considered uniquely typical of this historical epoch's more advanced societies?

Before answering this question, however, we must more precisely define the term modern, seeking an understanding of which special characteristics typify an advanced society. Such a definition is not easy to formulate in a brief essay, since debates on the topic often have produced as much confusion as they have consensus. But we must attempt at least a basic – if oversimplified – definition.

It seems to me that most of the writings on modernization converge in suggesting two basic features of the modern society. It is these two features that we shall take as the foundation of our discussion.

First: a modern (or “modernizing”) society values secular rationality and the scientific approach to learning and order. In other words, the accumulation of knowledge and the ordering of institutions in the modern society depend on empirical observation and the exercise of rational thought rather than on uncritical acceptance of divine revelation or tradition. In such societies people generally control nature rather than the reverse. Education is basically secular, scientific, and empirical.