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8.11. Japan

The revolutionary phase of the first epochal cycle – 660 BC – the official date of establishment of the emperor’s dynasty. Shintoism. The relation of the emperor with Amaterasu, the Goddess of Sun.

The involutionary period of the cycle – V century BC – V century AD. Traditionalism. The influence of the Chinese social-cultural tradition. 572-621 AD – Shotoku Taishi. Ranks. The beginning of the co-evolutionary phase. The spread of Zen Buddhism. 887-1068 – the rule of the clan of Fujiwara. 895 – the «closure» of Japan for foreigners. 958-1587 – the prohibition of coinage.

The evolutionary period. 1192-1333 – the shogunate of Minamoto. The samurai is the backing of the state machine. 1274-1281 – the reflections of Mongol attempts to invade Japan. 1336-1477 – the wars between the clans of the samurai.

The revolutionary phase of the second epochal cycle. 1603-1867 – the shogunate of Tokugawa. 1615 – the political unification of Japan – Edo (Tokyo) is the capital. 1636 – the closure of Japan for the European missionaries.

The involutionary period – 1688-1703 – the epoch of genroku – the blossom of the traditional Japanese urban culture.

The co-evolutionary phase. 1853 – Perry (USA) «opened» Japan for the foreigners. 1867-1868 – the «revolution of Meiji». A successful bourgeois-democratic revolution in Japan that turned the country into the industrial «West» in the «East». The evolutionary stage of the cycle is connected with the rapid modernization. The consolidation of the Japanese military power allowed it to conduct an active expansive policy in Asia. 1894-1895 – the war between Japan and China.

The evolutionary period of the second epochal cycle. 1904-1907 – the war between Japan and Russia. 1910-1945 – the annexation of Korea. 1931 - 1945 – the control over China. Conception «Asia for Asians». 1941 -1945 – the war with the USA. The defeat of Japan.

The revolutionary period of the third epochal cycle. 1946-1949 – the occupation by the USA – a new push to the industrial modernization of Japan, strengthening its strategic alliance with the USA. 1951 – San Francisco – the peace treaty. 1951-1953 – the Korean war. The involutionary period, which began in the 1960’s, turned Japan into an industrial superpower, the third financial-economic world center after the USA and the European Union.

Inner social processes are «pushing» Japan on the way to the co-evolutionary transient processes. The indications are as follows: the financial crisis of 1997 and the projected reforms in the country – preparations to a review of the Constitution dictated by the United States of America, the deep crisis of the Liberal-Democratic party guiding the country approximately fifty years, and so on.

8.12. The United States of America

The USA represent an unique phenomenon in the world’s history. In fact, they have turned from a colony to the leading world’s state for 300 years. This fact testifies the specificity of development of the national epochal cycle. The country has come to the flourishing with a rapid rate of movement along the history. The other leading European countries «spent» millenniums to go through this process.

The revolutionary phase of the first epochal cycle is connected with establishment of the British colonies by the most «passionary» migrants from Great Britain (1607). The transportation of the social experience of emigrants from the Old World to the American soil created a generally favorable ground for the dynamic development of a new complex nation. The involutionary period of its formation covered the latter half of the 17th century. The urban culture developed here faster than in Europe. Both the urban and country cultures were free from pre-capitalistic anachronisms. On the other side, the inner tendencies of the involutionary period actively stimulated the development of the extensive slave-owning forms of the economic development of the Southern states of the country, creating pre-conditions to the following conflict between the slave-owning agrarian South and industrially growing North.

The co-evolutionary stage is identified with events of the War for Independence (1776-1783). A regular consequence of the transient moment in the development became the Declaration of Independence (1776). One could speak about the stable evolutionary-democratic development of the USA since 1783. The most outstanding historic personalities were as follows: George Washington (1732-1799) – one of the parents-founders and the first President of the USA; Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), who strengthened the constitutional order in the USA; Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) – the ideologist of the American pragmatism. The positions of the USA in the Southern America were consolidated by the Monroe Doctrine (1823) that gave an indirect support to the fight for national independence of Latin-American states against the European colonial powers. The foundation of the leading political parties of the USA, Democratic (1828) and Republican (1854) ones, and the political activity of the Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) may also be referred to this period.

The revolutionary stage of the second epochal cycle is identified with the peripetias of the War between the States (1861-1865) which led to the abolishment of slavery by giving an additional impulse to development of the national market and accelerated the organic process of country’s industrialization.

The strengthening of the involutionary tendencies provided for the economic growth of the USA to the end of the 19th century and expanded the US possibilities in the sphere of external policy. After the war between America and Spain (1898), the expansion of the USA to Latin America is enlarging, which led to the establishment of political control over the majority of states of this continent. The following content of the evolutionary period became the participation of the USA in the First World War. However, the victory of isolationists over the line of President Woodraw Wilson (1919) weakened country’s external political positions in the League of Nations for some time.

Events of the Great Depression (1929-1933) became a turning (co-evolutionary) point in the history of the USA. The country entered the evolutionary period of the second epochal cycle since the times of the «New Deal» of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945). After the Second World War (1939-1945), the country turns into a superpower. This process was favored by the creation of A-bomb (1942-1945), creation of the NATO (1949), and realization of the Marshall plan (1947-1953) provided for a significant growth of the West-European economies.

The war of the US in Vietnam (1964-1973), youth protests (1968-1975), the deepening of racial problems, the Watergate process that ended in the resignation of President Richard Nixon (1974), the victory in the cold war, the beginning of the transformational processes in Central and Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the USSR (1989-1991), the presidency of Bill Clinton (1992-2000) which led the USA to the maximally possible status of the «last world’s state»[64] – all this gives serious grounds to assume that the USA are standing on the threshold of revolutionary events of the third epochal cycle, their probability growing since the beginning of the 21st century.

The overall prognosis of development of the situation in the above-mentioned countries of our research sampling may be presented as the following table.

#	Country	Number of completed epochal cycles	Developing Epochal Cycle	Period (Phase of the Developing Epochal Cycle)	Probability of Actualization of the Prospective Transient Period (Revolution/Co-evolution) with the beginning of the 21st century
1.	Vatican			Evol.	High (Revol.)
2.	Italy			Evol.	High (Revol.)
3.	Germany			Evol.	High (Revol.)
4.	Great Britain			Evol.	High (Revol.)
5.	France			Evol.	It is difficult to define
6.	Ukraine			Co-evol.	Actual (Со-evol.)
7.	Russia			Co-evol.	Actual (Со-evol.)
8.	Belarus			Revol.	Actual (Revol.)
9.	China			Evol.	Actual (Со-evol.)
10.	India			Evol.	Low
11.	Japan			Co-evol.	High (Со-evol.)
12.	USA			Evol.	High (Revol.)

The analysis of the social development with use of the methodics of universal epochal cycle in the research of a situation at the level of specific national state formations gives certain grounds to assume that, with the beginning of the new millennium, there is a growing probability that Western countries (the countries of the European historical-cultural area, in particular, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, and the USA) «enter» the period of crisis – new social revolutions which will open new horizons of social development to the world. The establishment of a new-type policy, devoid of the former «party-class» heredity will be the semantic content of the naissant situation in this region. At the same time, the situation in the Asian region (taking into account the other characteristics of development and those over the whole world) will be defined by the growing tendencies, characteristic of the evolutionary period of the social development. According to the former Secretary of State of the USA James Baker, they will be as follows: «the liberalization of economies» and «the emergence of a truly world economy», «the weakening of the spirit of collectivism (communism)» and «expanding possibilities for less amplitudinous conflicts», «the development of democracy as not only the form of state governance, but as a common set of norms and cultural values», and, in general – expansion of the conflict between «the nascent global democratic culture and the new movements»[65].

Thus, the hypothetical schemes of changes of the epochal cycles of the world’s history, built on the global, regional, and partially national levels, are to be empirically verified. This work assumes the development of a system of empirical indices and the conduction of necessary measurements, including the measurement of the corresponding societal indices. However, even in such a condition, the work performed confirms, in our opinion, the rightfulness of the offered conception of historical development. This conception can become a theoretical ground for the development of new methodological approaches in the system of social sciences.

CHAPTER 9

Glossary of main notions
and social theories

Anomy – state of a social system, which is characterized by the absence of commonly accepted values and norms as universal regulators of social behaviour of people. The phenomenon of anomy is inherent in social crises. The category if anomy is one of the key notions in the sociological conception of Durkheim. Under conditions of a global anomy, we observe the post-soviet society. A deepening of demoralization generates the normative reactions to the anomy: the traditionally archaic (requirement to return the old system of values) and authoritaristic (to bring a strong personality to power, which will establish «a hard order») ones. There exist two types of nonnormed reactions to the anomy: social cynicism (ignoration of norms) and extremism (orientation to destructive means of achievement of political purposes)[66].

Asymmetry (asymmetria in Greek) – lacking or breaking of a symmetry as high equilibrium; a natural property inherent in all social structural formations including societal qualities, which reflect the corresponding binary indices (scales); it lies in the basis of the formation of epochal and vital historical cycles of the social development. A degree of asymmetry, e.g., of the distribution of two components of the binary indices of societal qualities of the society is historically variable and can reveal the state of evolutionary development of the society[67].

Berdyaev Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1874-1948) – Russian philosopher. Berdyaev’s social theories are closely connected with his religious philosophy. He asserted that the historical process consists in a struggle of good against irrational freedom. When irrational freedom reaches a supremacy, reality begins to decay and return to the initial chaos. In the social life, a revolution is an extreme form of the return to chaos. Creation begins only in the period after the revolution, when new forms of life arise. But people never achieve the purposes they set before themselves even in creative epochs of the history. Historical failures pass the earthly time onto the eternal one in the divine life. The historical time can be symbolized with a line expanding forwards, but there is no difference between the past and the future in the existentialistic time (God’s realm), between the beginning and end. Therefore, the life at God’s realm is not a part of the history but is metahistorical. The metahistory is permanently present as a background of the history. All perversions of the personality, which are observed in the world, are overcome by means of a long-term process of development of reincarnations in many projections different from the projection of the objective world of phenomena[68].

Binary (binarius in Latin) – main characteristic of all natural processes since they consist of two opposite phases or sides. Under consideration of a social structure, duality represents a binary system basing on mutually balanced forces of opposite poles[69].

«Call» – «Reply» – notion introduced by A. Toynbee for designation of one of the defining characteristics of the rhythm of existence of civilizations. In Toynbee’s opinion, the passage of main stages of the life cycle by a civilization (birth, growth, fracture, degradation, and decay) is regulated by the law «call-reply»: every stage of development of a civilization is an adequate reply to a call of the environment. The last is natural for the first parent civilizations and natural-social for subsequent ones.

Calls can be stimulated by severe conditions of life, unexpected blow of enemy, or unfavorable social status. A call is created, as a rule, by the action of several factors. The absence of any call stimulates regress. A call should not be neither very weak since it stimulates no active reply nor too severe, which can stop the birth of a civilization or terminate its existence at a certain stage.

The basis of an adequate reply is created by the activity of the creative minority inventing new constructive ideas of historical transformations corresponding to a call. The development of a civilization continues until the minority is able to reproduce replies adequate to a call. Having lost this ability, the dominating minority degrades. On the opposite pole, the majority is represented by the «internal proletariat» – marginals. On the external boundaries, one can observe the concentration of the «external proletariat» – younger peoples to be backwards as compared with the fractured civilization by their level of development. However, a decline of civilizations can be postponed due to a rational policy of the governing class[70].

Civilization – level of social development, material and spiritual culture[71].

1) form of existence of living creatures endowed by intellect, 2) synonym of culture, totality of spiritual and material achievements of the society, 3) process of establishment of a public society, 4) comparatively self-supporting integral social-historical formation localized in space and time, which can have hierarchical levels. The term was introduced by Mirabeau (1757) and used by A. Fergusson and later by L. Morgan and F. Engels for designation of the highest epoch as compared with wildness and barbarism. Spengler considered the civilization as a concluding stage of the existence of culture, and Toynbee as a unit of the historical process. The civilizational approach to study of the history is concentrated at the mosaic of cultural-historical forms classified in the proper manner. Every civilization enriched the mankind with its experience[72]. The American politologist S. Huntington believes that since differences between civilizations formed during centuries, they are fundamental and more stable than ideological and class differences, moreover, modern conflicts will move from political borders to the lines of contact of civilizations, especially to countries whose population is represented by different civilizational groups.

Co-evolution – phase transition opposite to a revolution (in the direction from the state of involution to the state of evolution). Co-evolution is realized under conditions of one epochal cycle and, therefore, changes only the polarity of system properties of the society or vectors of social development[73].

Cycle [from kyklos (in Greek) – circle] – totality of mutually connected phenomena and processes, which reflects a completed circle of development during a certain temporal period. All the natural processes are cyclic including both the process of development of a civilization or a single society in space and time and change of forms or conditions of their existence irrespective of whether the question is cycles concerning specific spheres of social life (policy, economy, and culture) or the evolution of social signs laying in the basis of these phenomena[74]. Cycle is a totality of processes, works, and phenomena, which are interrelated and form a certain system or a completed circle of development[75].

Depression (depressio in Latin) – 1) dispirited blue psychic state; 2)stagnation of the economy after a crisis of overproduction, which is characterized by a stoppage of a further fall of production, trade, etc. and, at the same time, a slight demand for goods, mass unemployment[76].

Development of personality – process of formation of a personality as the social quality of an individual as a result of his socialization and education. By possessing natural anatomic-physiological preconditions to formation of the personality, a child begins to interact with the surrounding world in the process of socialization by mastering the achievements of the mankind. Aptitudes and functions of the personality, which are created during this process, reproduce historically formed human features. The child masters the reality during his activity with the assistance of adults. The process of education is a leading one for development of the personality, and the type of development of the personality is defined by a type of the group, in which the child is integrated.

East-West – geographical differentiation of the world-wide historical process attaching the civilizational and regional peculiarities to it. Objective-cultural adoptions as a consequence of peaceful contacts («Great silk way») or war conflicts (Greek-Persian wars, campaigns of Alexander the Great; crusades, great geographical discoveries; colonial captures) more often promote the acceleration of the historical development of «West» at the expense of subjection of «East». Approximately till the XV century when peculiarities of the historical development of West as a result of Reformation, Renaissance, and later Enlightenment were formed, the sociocultural values of East were universal, and those of West were unique. From the second half of the XX century, west values, conversely, are declared as universal. For example, Japan became «West» on East, and Turkey is «East» on West.

El’konin Daniil Borisovich (1904-1984) – soviet psychologist. By developing a position of the cultural-historical theory for solution of a wide circle of problems of the child psychology, he advanced the conception of periodization of the psychical development of children, based on the notion of «leading activity»[77].

Epoch – period of time (usually long) in the historical development of the nature, society, science, etc., which is distinct by characteristic peculiarities and significant events, processes, and phenomena.

Epochal historical cycle in the context of the proposed conception is a hypothetical model of the scheme of a cyclic historical development from the revolutionary stage (radical qualitative overturn of the whole social structure of the society leading the development in the direction of progress or regress, which generalizes results of development of the society during the whole epochal cycle and brings it to a new stage of development, to the involution, which is the period of the mastering of new qualitative changes acquired by the society during the revolution, and further to the co-evolutionary stage. The last is a phase transition from the state of involution to the state of evolution, which conducts a epochal historical cycle to the state with maximum utilization of results of the previous stages of development, whereas evolution is preparing a new revolution opening the next epochal cycle. The approximate scheme of universal epochal historical cycle can be as follows: revolution – involution – co-evolution – evolution.

Era – 1) moment, from which one conducts the chronology, e.g., Christmas in Christians (our Era); 2) large historical period, epoch[78].

Erikson Eric (1902-1994) – American psychologist, the representative of ego-psychology. Contrary to the thesis of psychoanalysis on the antagonism of a personality and the society, he emphasized the biosocial nature and adaptive character of behaviour of a personality, whose central integral quality is the psychosocial identity. Being subjectively experienced as the feeling of continuous self-identity, the psychosocial identity is based on the acceptance by the personality of the own integral image in the unity with diverse social connections. A change in social-cultural conditions of the existence of the personality leads to the loss of the previous identity and the necessity of formation of a new one. Personal difficulties arising in this way can cause a hard neurosis («loss of himself»). On this basis, Erikson made conclusion about the conditionality of mass neuroses by deep shocks in the life of the society on turns of the history[79].

Evolution – one of the forms of development in the nature and society – continuous quantitative change, as distinct from revolution, being a radical qualitative change; evolution prepares revolution and creates the corresponding soil for it, whereas revolution completes evolution, promotes a further development, and opens quantitatively new possibilities for evolution[80].

Formal group – consolidation of people for implementation of a socially prescribed activity under condition of their direct communication and interaction[81].

Gender – one of the principal notions of the contemporary sociology meaning a collection of expected samples of behaviour (norms) for men and women. As distinct from the notion of sex, gender is referred, first of all, to socially formed features of «womanhood» and «manhood» (executiveness/intentionality). The term «gender» was proposed by the American psychoanalyst R. Stoller in 1968[82].

Gender roles depend on culture. In nomadic cultures (of nomads and gatherers), education of boys and girls is practically the same since men and women perform almost the same work. In agricultural societies, roles are more differentiated; in industrial societies, gender roles are extremely diverse. Among administration, women constitute 20% in the South Korea, 17% in the USA, and 45% in Switzerland. Gender roles also depend on epoch. From 1960 till 1995, the share of American women in labour power has grown from one third to almost three fifths[83].

Gumilev Lev Nikolaevich (1912-1994) advanced a conception of development of the ethnic history. Ethnos is considered as a collective of people, which was naturally composed on the basis of an original stereotype and exists as an energetic system opposing itself to other similar collectives. Nonhomogeneity of the distribution of biochemical energy of the vital substance of the biosphere for a long-term historical time influences the behaviour of ethnic collectives in various epochs and in various regions. Gumilev called the effect performed by variations of this energy, as a specific property of the character of people, by passionarity. Passionarity is the irreversible internal aspiration to activity directed to the implementation of some goal. A passionary person can consider this goal to be more valuable than even life. Ethnogenesis is regarded as a process of development of the ethnos from the moment of its origin till disappearance or the transition to the state of homeostasis. Gumilev distinguished the phase of stationary push (search for a success with risk for life), acmic phase (aspiration to the ideal of victory, sacrifice), fracture (aspiration to well-being without any risk for life), inertial phase or obscuration (quiet inhabitants adapted to the biocenosis of an areal). An approximate scheme of the phases of ethnogenesis, composed by Gumilev, has the following form: a growth – «Be by whom you must be»; the acmic phase (passionary overheating) – «Be by himself; the passage to the phase of fracture – «We are tired of the great persons»; the phase of fracture – «Permit us to live!»; fracture – «Only not so as it was»; the transition to the inertial phase – «Be such as I»; obscuration – «Be such as we»; the transition to homeostasis – «But when will it finish?»; homeostasis – «Be satisfied by himself»; the transition to the memorial phase – «Not all is perished!»; the memorial phase – «Remember how it was nice»; and the degeneration – «We wish nothing».

Harmonization – process of achievement of the state of harmony or the dialectic «removal» of contradictions in the process of origin of the state of a self-organizing system, which is characterized by stability with respect to various destabilizing factors.

Harmony (harmonia in Greek) – 1) combination of music tones in a simultaneous sounding, consonance; 2) coordination, fine combination, commensurability of various properties, objects, phenomena, parts of the whole[84].

Hegel Georg W. F. (1770-1830) – German philosopher. In his works, he stated the comprehension of history as a development of spirit in time. By Hegel, the goal of the history is a development of the freedom of a citizen in the civil society. Since the realization of freedom necessarily includes the fact that the «world spirit» realizes itself as free, the history is also a progress in realization of freedom. In Hegel’s opinion, the principle of historical development is the reflection of a state of the society. When the spirit of an epoch will realize itself, the form will be historically completed. Realization means the overcoming of the previously existing form of spirit and, by virtue of this, the starting point of a new spirit of the epoch. This constitutes the essential difference between Hegel’s conception of history and Marx’s conception. The last emphasizes a conditionality of the historical development by more dynamical production forces and less movable social relations. The development of the world spirit occurs not automatically. It cannot avoid the participation of people. By pursuing their private interests, people make more than they intend. Without comprehension of this fact, they realize regularities of the history by pushing its course forwards.

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