The Mystification of Culture

Abstract

In Western media coverage, Japan is portrayed as a country defined by its difference from the West. The repeated emphasis on cultural difference is a coded way of discussing racial difference. Examples discussed include British press coverage of the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 50th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War. A similar `racial' conception of culture also underpins academic analyses of Japanese cultural difference, for example in anthropology. Far from offering an explanation, the tendency is to mystify culture by treating it as the starting point for analysis, rather than examining its social and historical roots. Cultural studies has attempted to challenge essentialist conceptions of identity and difference by treating cultural phenomena as operating `like a language'. Yet similar problems - of dehistoricizing culture, naturalizing differences and making culture appear as a determining force - beset this approach too.