“Bunburying” in the Japan Field: A Reply to Jeff Humphries Masao Miyoshi (bio) Jeff[erson] Humphries’ “Japan in Theory” has so many things wrong and hardly anything worth critical or scholarly scrutiny. A rebuttal to an essay like this will be—of necessity—tiresome to write, and perhaps even worse to read. In order to answer it fairly, a respondent needs to descend to its level. For unlike Humphries who concludes the essay by denying the connection between a study and its stated object—of which more later—I fully intend to ground this response on the text of “Japan in Theory,” however muddy and muddled it may be. It’s not easy, I repeat, because Humphries’ essay is malicious, ignorant, inaccurate, irresponsible, dishonest, fraudulent, lazy, sloppy, unhistorical, and incoherent. These are adjectives one seldom encounters in a scholarly publication, not because they violate the code of academic decorum, but because a professional journal ordinarily rejects lamentable chaff like this paper, obviating the need for such words. Somehow this piece squeaked through. To list all of his errors and misrepresentations, however, might be a little too extreme, since the list alone, sans commentaries, will have to be as long as Humphries’ essay itself. Let me thus focus on several crucial points. I. Exclusivism Right on the first page, Humphries introduces the “coloniz[ers]” of Japanese studies in America. “Many of them [are] Japanese immigrants, others defectors from the conservative scholasticism of their ‘missionary’ (literal or figurative) parents.” He identifies this group of “theoretically-minded scholars” who split the “Japanese studies community” as the “contributors to Miyoshi’s edited volume Postmodernism and Japan,” “Miyoshi and all the others,” “[t]he Japanese and expatriate Japanese contributors to this book,” and “this volume and all professional conclaves.” These are indeed vague terms, and yet Humphries refers to the “integrity of the group,” as if there existed a cabal of fanatics sworn to the conspiracy of an academic take-over. [End Page 625] First, Humphries describes the “group” (let me assume here for the sake of argument that the contributors to the volume indeed form a collective) as consisting largely of “Japanese immigrants” and “defectors” from their parental “scholasticism.” Unable to recall at once any immigrant member other than myself in his imaginary organization, I went back to the table of contents of Postmodernism and Japan in an effort to discover other alien settlers on this soil. There are four—or possibly five—Japanese-born Japanese-citizen writers (Arata Isozaki, Kojin Karatani, Kenzaburo Oe, and Akira Asada), but “immigrants”? As far as I know, they all carry their Japanese passports. There is no one else—with the possible exception of Naoki Sakai who may qualify for the “immigrant” category. But I don’t know what his nationality is: it has never occurred to me to ask him. Nor do I know, I must confess, the exact definition of an “immigrant.” Is a permanent resident an immigrant? Does a resident with double citizenship count as one? A regular visitor? Of course, Humphries may have meant that people with Japanese last names are all immigrants—since they all look different from him—regardless of the number of their familial generations who have settled in the United States, like Tetsuo Najita. Two problems arise at once. One, obviously Tetsuo Najita, who was born in the United States, lost two brothers in World War II for the United States, and is now the chair of the History—not Japanese History—Department and Robert Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, is no more “Japanese immigrant” than Humphries is. Two, aside from Najita and those four Japanese-Japanese who reside in Japan, plus Sakai, simply no one else has a Japanese last name. Is it possible that Humphries’ paranoia about the immigrants in the United States is so acute that he cannot recognize the non-Japanese-Americans who constitute an overwhelming majority in this secret organization: Harootunian, Ivy, Koschmann, Field, Wolfe, DeBary, Stephen Melville, Michael Ryan, and Jonathan Arac (the last two were invited to and attended—that is, not excluded from—the initial workshop, though neither gave us papers. See our acknowledgement on p. xix). That...