 The Overcoming Modernity symposium has been aptly characterized as “a premature challenge to the questions that have yet to be answered today” (Minamoto 1994, 200). Even one of the most critical accounts of this symposium—an account which argues that the “only destination reached by the symposium on overcoming modernity was the place where Japan itself had been overcome by modernity”—concedes that: “It is, nevertheless, important to point out that the very critique mounted by Japanese against modernity prefigured precisely all of those doubts and obsessions concerning subjectivity, cultural difference, and even racism that have become the signatures of a Western and putatively global discourse that marks our own historical conjuncture today” (Harootunian 2000, 94).