从现代化论视角纵观日本100多年来的发展历程，可以将其分为两个现代化转型阶段。本文通过分析日本社会在这两次转型阶段中的历史轮廓及其遇到的主要问题，得出结论：日本作为“追赶型”后进国家，在迈向现代化的进程中，将空间上和时间上的两个阶段压缩为一个阶段。因此，日本社会现代化发展呈现“空间压缩”特征，主要表现为“个人主义观念的缺失”、“近代家庭的出现和瓦解”、“民主政治和贵族政治并存”以及“双重经济结构”等，由此导致传统与现代、东方与西方的思想观念和制度架构一并“杂居”于日本的现代化进程中。未来日本如何处理社会转型期间传统与现代融合的问题，仍呈现复杂交织的状态，值得进一步观察。
From the perspective of the modernization theory，Japan’s modernization transformation can be divided into two historical stages. By analyzing the history of Japanese society in those two stages，it can be concluded that Japan，as a “catch-up” country，compresses those two stages into a single stage in the process of moving towards modernization. Therefore，the development of Japanese social modernization presents the characteristics of “space compression”，reflected the lack of individualism，the emergence and disintegration of modern family，the coexistence of democratic politics and aristocratic politics and the dual economic structure，which results in a mixture of the traditional and modern cultures together with eastern and western ideologies and institutional structures in the process of modernization. Japan’s way to deal with the problem of the integration of tradition and modernization in the social transformation remain complicated and is worthy of further observation.
