For Japan, 2019 was a momentous year: coming after the muted 2018 celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, and a year before the Olympic Games were meant to be held in Tokyo, it marked the transition, for only the fourth time since 1868, from one imperial reign name, Heisei, to another, Reiwa. It also marked the ninetieth birthday of Japanese historian Harry D. Harootunian, and the publication of Uneven Moments, a volume of his collected essays.

Harootunian's career as an intellectual historian of both early modern and modern Japan covers half a century. The volume's introduction, divided into two sections, offers a retrospective of this career by Harootunian himself. In “Aspirations”, Harootunian presents a statement of his “perspective on history”, followed in “Actualization” by an overview of his scholarly work, “the specific phases” which characterize his interests, and the “accompanying mediations” that have shaped his outlook (p. 7). Although averse to such linear narratives upon which biographies tend to rely, Harootunian's own provides insight into both his approach to Japan (not as a “field of knowledge” but “a way to exemplify and instantiate disciplinary knowledge, history”), and his positions against Area Studies and Modernization theory as the two were mobilized as part of US Cold War policy towards Asia.

Although the essays collected in this volume span four decades, their centre of gravity is Harootunian's more recent work – eight of the twelve chapters are from 2000 or later. That being said, the four sections of the book neatly encapsulate the breadth of Harootunian's output, and the historical questions to which he has returned over the course of his career. The book's first section features two critiques of Area Studies programmes and their afterlives, a critique which focuses on the academic discipline's inability to escape the conditions of its creation in the “regimes of knowledge which prevailed throughout the Cold War” (p. 51). The second section includes essays on culture and politics in Tokugawa Japan, the subject of Harootunian's first two monographs, Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley, 1970) and Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago, 1988). The third section is the book's longest, containing six of its twelve chapters, and focuses on an “abiding lifetime's preoccupation”: “the everyday and its claim on historical knowledge”. For Harootunian, the everyday is a lived present, “filled with coexisting traces of pasts” (p. 3) which he excavates in both inter-war Tokyo and contemporary Fukushima. In the book's fourth and final section, Harootunian provides a response to the oldest essay in the book, “Visible discourses/Invisible ideologies” (originally published in South Atlantic Quarterly in 1988) in the volume's only previously unpublished essay, “The presence of archaism/The persistence of fascism”. Both works deal with another central theme for Harootunian: Japan's negotiations between modernity, in the form of capitalism, and archaism, in the form of its emperor.

In the title of the volume are distilled two of Harootunian's key concerns. First, the recording of unevenness: those mixed temporalities and developments caused by and made visible through regimes of capital which national histories attempt to mediate and erase. Second, for Harootunian, the most productive unevenness is that found between politics and culture at certain moments of rupture – moments that he has returned to over his career: late Tokugawa, interwar, and postwar Japan. Harootunian's work identifies discursive attempts to “overcome” such unevenness in all three moments. In the book's final chapter he continues this work, suggesting that the second prime ministry of Abe Shinzō, a “virtual regime change”, contains within it the promise of a conquest or completion of the postwar “state of permanent war defeat” (p. 330).

For whom is this volume intended? For scholars and students of Japanese history, the collection, with its retrospective introduction by the author and wide-ranging, digestible essays, offers a relatively easy entry to a body of work that, due to Harootunian's complex prose style, can often be overfacing. For historians of other parts and times of the world, Harootunian's approach to the history of Japan and its thought, described by Umemori Naoyuki as that of someone who “holds no concern for Japan”, (p. 10) offers an intellectual framework that at once connects Japanese history with world historical questions, but also with the reception and use of such discourses by Japanese historians and theorists too. One wonders if this volume would have benefitted from a preface by a figure outside of the Japan “field” to further contextualize Harootunian's many contributions and widen the book's readership.

The impact of Harootunian's body of work on Japanese history cannot be overstated. Many of his concerns – history-writing beyond the linear narrative form, the need for histories of smaller units than the nation-state – have become our own, whether we recognize our debts to him or not. Whilst the field of Japanese history and the demographics of those involved in Japanese history-writing are changing, a matter Harootunian himself addresses in chapter 2 of the volume, his approach to the study of Japan remains instructive. The volume's final essay on the second Prime Ministry of Abe Shinzō, as well as the chapter “Reflections on Fukushima: history, memory, and the crisis of contemporaneity”, are critical and provocative works that resonate with the current global pandemic, as “history and memory” are “involuntarily throw[n] together” and we face new examples of the state's “continuing production … of uneven past[s]” (p. 295). That this reviewer had hoped for more discussion of the recent imperial abdication and era change shows the continued relevance of Harootunian's critiques of Japanese “emperorism” and its relationship with the past. This is a timely and thought-provoking collection of essays, outlining a body of work that has benefitted from Harootunian's self-proclamation that he is not “a patriot of somebody else's history” (p. 10).