Showdown at Culture Gap: Images of the West in the Plays of Shuji Terayama

Abstract

Although the popular press recently announced the "discovery" of hanbei (Japanese anti-American sentiment) and kenbei, its more virulent, gut-level version, such attitudes are far from new. Japanese intellectuals and artists have suffered from an intensely paradoxical ambivalence toward "the Other" for at least 1500 years, ever since initial contact with China forced Japan to confront conflicting attitudes of cultural superiority and cultural indebtedness. It can be argued that Japanese intellectual history is a pendulum swinging wildly between the extremes of national self-aggrandizement and feelings of inferiority.