Rethinking Japanese Studies: Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region ed. by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rethinking Japanese Studies: Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region ed. by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto Amy Borovoy (bio) Rethinking Japanese Studies: Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region. Edited by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto. Routledge, London, 2018. xiv, 231 pages. $150.00, cloth; $49.95, paper; $54.95, E-book. This valuable anthology invites us to reflect on the continuing reality that Japan studies globally has been dominated by Anglophone scholarship, with key publications in English—and with the West often serving as the primary point of comparison. It offers a window into the field of Japan studies in South Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Japan itself and showcases collaborative research projects that study transnational interplay among East Asian nations. The critical framework embraced in the introductory and concluding essays by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto draws from post–cold war and postcolonial reflections on U.S. global hegemony and the postcolonial critique of Eurocentric narratives of modernity. In this formulation, as articulated by Dipesh Chakrabarty and others, economic and social development were imagined as shared historical processes, in which Europe took the lead and all other nations would follow. Social and historical differences were interpreted as matters of "time" and accounted for by the language of "partial development." The historicist assumption of a shared, unilineal path to modernity made it difficult to acknowledge "coeval" modernities, which are contemporaneous but different.1 The aftermath of Japan's own empire has helped shift this Eurocentric frame. We now find a strong interest in Japan studies in Southeast and East Asia itself, in the form of growing library resources, flourishing language programs, and increasing numbers of students obtaining higher degrees in Japan. The resituation of Japan, beginning in the 1970s, has created another center of Japan studies (in Asia) that circumvents the West and seemingly offers an opportunity to replace the East-West binary. Japan studies in Asia creates comparisons with other Asian nations and pays greater attention to the transnational flow of ideas, bodies, and goods, including the history of colonialism that shaped the landscape of modernity itself in the area. The essays emerged from the 2015 Conference of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia, a nation on the edge of the Anglophone "center" but also an ethnically diverse nation, firmly tethered to Asia. Australian Japan [End Page 372] studies escaped some of the missionary zeal of postwar U.S. Japan studies, and the project of Japan studies has been more deliberately global and comparative, as Carolyn Stevens notes in her essay. For this reason, it is hard to imagine such a volume emerging from U.S. or European counterparts. In asking how Asian and transnational approaches contribute to the study of Japan more globally, the book also raises challenging questions about what a truly cosmopolitan study of Japan might look like. This is no simple matter, as the authors show. While the critique of "Eurocentrism" emerged in response to histories of European imperialism, Japan represents its own center of power in Asia, which continues through the influence of Japanese wealth and overseas aid. How can Japan's growing power in shaping Japan studies in Asia (studies published in Asian or Japanese languages) remain open to cosmopolitanism and not simply replace one parochial center with another? The initial essay by Eiji Oguma explores why Japanese scholars continue to publish predominantly in Japanese. Oguma points to Japan's large domestic market for books. Publishers rarely seek to publish outside Japan, because they already have more than 100 million readers at home. The Japanese have a long tradition of self-study and "monologic" writing, including government-sponsored compilations of national histories and folklore studies. Until relatively recently, Japanese university professors have had stronger financial incentives to publish to a general Japanese audience than to publish their research internationally (p. 25). Oguma's analysis tells us that that Japan's large domestic market allowed it to remain inward-looking through the decades of modernization and "internationalization." Japanese language is simply sufficient within Japan's Japan studies, and this is particularly true in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences, which are the volume's focus. (The natural sciences and quantitative social...