The Japanese tourist survival guide: Undead tropes of the Pacific War in contemporary New Zealand literature

Abstract

During the 1980s Japanese corporations acquired a strong foothold in the American market, prompting media commentators to speculate that American society was being undermined by an encroaching Japanese “takeover”. Employing a comparative approach, I place New Zealand source material in conversation with an American cultural context in order to expose the mobility and malleability of Japanophobic discourses. New Zealand culture provides a basis for comparison in that the nation contained no hi-tech or car manufacturing industries, and yet writers there took issue with the presence of Japanese tourists and their increasing purchasing power. Writers Keri Hulme and Vivienne Plumb portrayed the Japanese as vampires and body-snatchers, while Ian Middleton suggested that the Japanese were seeking an escape from modern culture into an “untouched”, pre-modern environment. These features set New Zealand writing apart from the thriller genre adopted by Michael Crichton, Steven Schlossstein, and Tom Clancy. But in spite of these differences, a crosscurrent runs through both the New Zealand and American sources, making them more alike than not — that is, they all hark back to the wartime tropes of the Pacific War, which were reinstated within the context of the 1980s.