Japanese Exceptionalism Research Articles

Global processes of anthropogenesis characterise the early Anthropocene in the Japanese Islands

Although many scholars date the onset of the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution or the post-1945 ‘Great Acceleration’, there is growing interest in understanding earlier human impacts on the earth system. Research on the ‘Palaeoanthropocene’ has investigated the role of fire, agriculture, trade, urbanisation and other anthropogenic impacts. While there is increasing consensus that such impacts were more important than previously realised, geographical variation during the Palaeoanthropocene remains poorly understood. Here, we present a preliminary comparative analysis of claims that pre-industrial anthropogenic impacts in Japan were significantly reduced by four factors: the late arrival of agriculture, an emphasis on wet-rice farming limited to alluvial plains, a reliance on seafood rather than domesticated animals as a primary source of dietary protein, and cultural ideologies of environmental stewardship. We find that none of these claims of Japanese exceptionalism can be supported by the archaeological and historical records. We make some suggestions for further research but conclude that the Japanese sequence appears consistent with global trends towards increased anthropogenic impacts over the course of the Palaeoanthropocene.

Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku by David J. Gundry

Reviewed by: Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku by David J. Gundry J. Scott Miller Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku. By David J. Gundry. Leiden: Brill, 2017. 300 pages. Hardcover, €99.00/ $114.00. For many of us, the fiction of Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) shares one characteristic with other lengthy, difficult works of classic literature: although recognition is mandatory, actual familiarity is rare. We relish delivering the amazing statistics of Saikaku's haikai prolificity, including his twelve-hour impromptu composition of a thousand memorial verses after the death of his wife and 16,000-verse marathon written in one twenty-four-hour period, yet find his allusive and complex fiction difficult and even baffling. Still, as David J. Gundry clearly demonstrates in his groundbreaking new book, Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku, familiarity with Saikaku can breed something much more useful than contempt. The first book-length study of Saikaku in English, this volume makes a welcome appearance, especially to those of us who teach Saikaku, and leaves us wondering why we have had to wait until now for such a monograph. We discover, through Gundry's masterful analysis of Saikaku's allusive and at times nearly impossible prose, that the dense and rich style of the author of the renowned The Life of an Amorous Man does not yield its treasures easily. Yet we also learn that, in terms of helping to illuminate both Genroku culture and Edo-period social transformations, those treasures are well worth the effort required to bring them to light. [End Page 90] Years ago a colleague of mine in German literature delivered a campus-wide lecture whose thesis revolved around the innovative, even revolutionary, literary focus on money in the works of Bertolt Brecht. I talked to him after the lecture about Ihara Saikaku's Seken mune san'yō (Worldly Mental Calculations) to open him up to new horizons. Gundry does something similar in this book, puncturing both the myth promoted by Mikhail Bakhtin and Milan Kundera that the novel is a solely European product and the myth present in vestigial nihonjinron: "I aim to counter discourses of European and Japanese exceptionalism" (p. 3, n. 7). The author strives to update and upgrade the standard view of Saikaku as an iconoclastic bad boy, replacing it with a more nuanced reading that articulates his personal familiarity with the complexities of chōnin (townspeople's) upward mobility as characterized by the tension in his world between money and inherited social status (p. 17). Gundry writes nearly as much against received Saikaku translations and interpretations as he does about Saikaku, maintaining a running comparison between variant renderings in copious footnotes that become one's faithful companions across most of the chapters—replaced, where published English or French translations do not exist, with citations of current Japanese scholarly interpretations. The cumulative effect underscores the impoverished state of Saikaku interpretations in Western languages, reflected in the many and disparate partial translations, that this work seeks to rectify. The book follows a predictable structure: a long introduction setting forth the scholarship and approach, then several main chapters, each addressing one Saikaku work and providing summaries, translations of select passages, and brief contextualizing analyses. It contains a healthy footnote-to-text proportion that signals the degree of attention its author has given to other studies and translations. Gundry opens his introduction, covering nearly forty pages, by establishing an interpretive framework and allows that section to do much of the theoretical heavy lifting, leaving the chapters that follow to unpack each of the four selected texts with a plot summary and analysis (or, in the case of anthologized texts, summaries of stories grouped around key themes). The four works he takes up are Kōshoku ichidai otoko (The Life of an Amorous Man; 1682), Kōshoku gonin onna (Five Women Who Loved Love; 1686), Honchō nijū fukō (Twenty Cases of Filial Impiety in Japan; 1686), and Budō denraiki (Exemplary Tales of the Way of the Warrior; 1687). Because the latter two have heretofore received very little attention in the West, Gundry makes an especially valuable contribution by giving...

Japanese Exceptionalism and Play Hegemony: The Construction of Ludic Traditions in Video Games Criticism

Japanese Exceptionalism and Play Hegemony: The Construction of Ludic Traditions in Video Games Criticism

Greater East Asia Geopolitics and its geopolitical imagination of a borderless world: A neglected tradition?

This paper demonstrates one way to reconsider pluralism in international relations theory through Japan's appropriation of European geopolitics. It is argued that the absence of non-Western theory often suggests the absence of non-Western subjectivity in world politics. In this debate, Japan, the sole non-Western country that abuses geopolitics to become a colonial empire, is a conundrum, particularly in terms of the relation of power and space. This paper shows how geopolitical theory can be differently interpreted by local political practices and its historical language, and how such mutations have been overlooked in the wider debate by examining conceptual divergence in the theory. Japanese geopolitics during the Second World War, called Daitōa Chiseigaku (Greater East Asia Geopolitics), envisaged the state as a territory without borders, in contrast to common assumptions in Anglophone international relations theory that modern Japan followed the European imperial order of territorial states. By excavating this story of Japanese geopolitics, this paper neither wants to assert another Japanese exceptionalism, nor to exhaust the hidden richness of Japanese theory to propose an alternative geopolitical discourse. Rather, it wants to reconsider the ways in which even state-centric geopolitical theory can be diverse in order to better understand the complex development of the map of modern states.

Transnational History and Japan’s “Comparative Advantage”

The growing field of transnational or global history spotlights connections among nations and empires. This essay suggests ways in which historians of modern Japan might contribute to transnational history, taking advantage of their Japanese subjects’ determined emulation of ideas and practices in other nations. Thinking transnationally about Japan not only challenges myths of Japanese exceptionalism but also enriches transnational history by going beyond Euro-centric and U.S.-centered accounts to illuminate global currents. To demonstrate the potential benefits, I draw on several transnational studies of Japan as well as my own global history of saving money and current research on the “transnational home front.”

Japanese Colonialism in Comparative Perspective

This article examines the economic consequences of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria between 1910 and 1945 and compares Japanese policies with those implemented by other colonial powers in Southeast Asia. In particular it addresses the writings of an influential group of American scholars who have published widely on Japanese colonial policies over the last fifty years. Their work has been used to support the argument that Japanese colonial policy was more developmental than that of other colonial powers and laid the foundations for the stellar economic performance of Taiwan and the Republic of Korea in the decades after 1950. To challenge this argument, this article compares a number of economic and social indicators in Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria with those from other Asian colonies, as well as Thailand and showing that while the Japanese colonies, especially Taiwan, score well on some indicators, they do less well on others. The idea of Japanese exceptionalism cannot be accepted uncritically.

The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura

their own lives through writing. Ian Hamilton ’s hesitant language to retell the death of his father, for example, neatly offsets the luminous productivity of Ted Hughes who, under an isolating spell of Beethoven, could compose an entire creation through employing close proximity of noun phrases swelling inside a forceful vortex of sentences . As Hofmann describes both the creation and healing exhibited by these works, he reflects his experience with the written word in English as restorative. Unfortunately, the invigorating rush of language dampens when Hofmann concentrates on those works not originally written in English. This is clear in his initial skirmish with a particularly discordant translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems. His description of the attempt as “slack, chattersome, hysterical, full of exaggeration , complacency, and reaching for effect” despite his unfamiliarity with the original Polish, displays a flawless sensitivity to the subtleties of language. This acute awareness of language intensifies when he contrasts two translations from German. He dismisses Schaefer’s rendition of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Dream Story,” while praising Davies’. This recognition is so complete that Hofmann concludes: “It’s no great mystery, and nothing much to do with German; both ‘translate’ the German, but I’m afraid only one of them writes English.” But perhaps it has everything to do with German. The painful rendering of a doublefaced Günter Grass quadruples in torment when discovering the deeply psychic division of Gottfried Benn, whose autobiographical Doppelleben grossly underestimates the consequences of a life ruptured by history and circumstance. Lesions deepen even further as the collection ends with Robert Walser, a writer whose microscopic letterings were so small they could only be discerned as alphabetic when placed under “an optical device used for the counting of threads.” Overall, the collection of essays begins on a soaring note and ends as tragic. English as anesthesia, when applied topically, soothes the psyche of a critic aiming to navigate literature for the reader. The compass’s intended stabilizing force, however, diminishes when German stands alone. Andrea Dawn Bryant Leipzig, Germany Minae Mizumura. The Fall of Language in the Age of English. Mari Yoshihara & Juliet Winters Carpenter, tr. New York. Columbia University Press. 2015. isbn 9780231163026. Minae Mizumura is no stranger to accolades , having won major awards for many of her books, including the Kobayashi Hideo Award for this one. These honors notwithstanding , The Fall of Language proves hard to review. Part polemic, part self-important autobiography, and part panegyric, this fluid mix yields a thought-provoking romp through the gravid fields of translation studies, linguistic imperialism, and identity. Both the premise and promise are inherently appealing to anyone who works in multiple languages. Indeed, if the author is to be believed, the topic is of global concern to all speakers of a language other than English. On the other hand, her argument is rife with examples of Nihonjinron (theories of Japanese uniqueness) that almost scream out to be challenged. Complicating matters is the fact that there is more than a grain of truth in some of the realities underlying this Japanese exceptionalism , and it is those elements that help support what is, ultimately, an intriguing rumination —highly personal, broadly relevant, and often frustrating—on the fate of local and national languages in the face of an apparently monolithic universal language. It is an obvious irony that Mizumura’s polemic against English is being reviewed as a translation into that very language, but it is also fortuitous, for it convincingly demonstrates her proposition. She posits that English has supplanted Latin, after centuries of domination and through the caprice of historical accidents, to become Greg Sarris Grand Avenue University of Oklahoma Press Set in Northern California, Grand Avenue weaves together the stories of people from many different ethnic and racial backgrounds as they live their lives and overcome obstacles. The novel mainly focuses on a group of Pomo Indians descended from a single person, all of whom are seeking meaning in life outside the reservation. Vladislav Otroshenko Addendum to a Photo Album Lisa Hayden, tr. Dalkey Archive Following the lives of a Russian Cossack family as they fulfill their duties both to country and to one another, this clever book shows people...

Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era by Tessa Morris-Suzuki (review)

Reviewed by: Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era by Tessa Morris-Suzuki Youngmi Lim (bio) Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era, by Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xi, 286 pages, illustrations, maps, references, index. $99.00 cloth, $36.99 paper. The year 2012 witnessed increased tensions between South Korea and Japan over the disputed sovereignty of the islets of Dokdo/Takeshima. The generally amicable relationship between the two nations rests on unsettled debates, though. Japan's colonization, war responsibilities, and the territorial sovereignty of Dokdo/Takeshima are the major simmering issues. Regardless of how thoroughly the Japanese have embraced South Korean popular icons, these debates and tensions have had a cooling effect on South Korea-Japan relations. A movement of revisionist history around since the mid-1990s and xenophobic Internet-based activism in the 2000s have vehemently denied Japan's responsibility for war and colonization. Contemporary Japanese anti-Korean sentiments represent the die-hard legacy of colonial and postcolonial racial hierarchies and the bungled handling of postwar and postcolonization political affairs. The surfacing of dormant historical and territorial disputes with South Korea has triggered outbreaks of public displays of anti-Korean racism in Japan. Tessa Morris-Suzuki's 2010 monograph, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era, should interest those who study Korea-Japan relations, the Korean minority population in Japan, and the construction and contour of Japanese and Korean collective identities during a period of aging populations and projected labor shortages in Japan and in South Korea. Scholars concerned with the development of border controls and immigration policy in twenty-first century East Asia will also benefit from Morris-Suzuki's critical analysis of the formative period of Japan's contemporary immigration control. The author presents bottom-up narratives about the effects of Cold War politics on the origins of Japan's post-World War II border control system and individual lives stranded in legal limbo by revisiting the geopolitical conditions of the Korean peninsula and Japan following Japan's defeat and the Allied occupation of Japan and Korea. Placing individual narratives of detained Korean illegal migrants, border-control officers, and policy-makers in the context of broader political and ideological forces when the Iron Curtain was just about to be drawn tight, this volume provides readers with a critical guide to contemporary issues that complicate the relationship between Japan and both Koreas. Based on exhaustive archival research in Japan, Korea, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and Switzerland, as well as in-depth [End Page 149] interviews with undocumented, "irregular," Korean migrants in Japan and secondary sources such as newspaper articles and personal memoirs, Morris-Suzuki elucidates how Japan's contemporary border-control system was established in response to the particular historical circumstances of Cold-War-ridden East Asian geopolitics. She reports on resistance in popular discourse and among policy makers to proposals to overcome Japan's economic malaise through increased immigration (chap. 9). This volume thus situates Japanese border policies in a broader context of the marginalization of ethnic minorities and immigrant laborers so ubiquitously observed during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The immediate postwar period marks a critical juncture: Japan had lost her colonies, including Taiwan, Korea, and the southern half of Sakhalin, as well as the puppet state of Manchukuo. Hastily redrawn national boundaries (pp. 28-32) decisively influenced displaced individuals' fates—especially those of Koreans. Japan's colonial rule had provoked large-scale Korean population movements across East Asia, mainly for survival or Japanese war mobilization, but with the drawing of new borders they often found themselves "stranded on the wrong side of the line" (p. 33). It was part of a vast imposition of impassable national borders drawn between Japan and Korea, Japan and Okinawa, and Japan and China, and between ideologically divided Koreas and Chinas. New borders made the movement across these boundaries impossible for ordinary people. Morris-Suzuki challenges two commonly held assumptions: (1) Japanese exceptionalism among industrialized nations in receiving its immigrant labor force and (2) hierarchical categorizations reflecting contemporary national-border-crossing practices. It has often been assumed that...

Othering, racial hierarchies and identity construction in Japanese television advertising

Although non-Japanese actors have appeared in Japanese television commercials for years, little systematic research has been conducted on them. Using a sample of 20,000 commercials, this article shows that the inclusion of ‘Others’ in TV commercials conforms to an artificial ‘racial hierarchy’ that mirrors Japanese society’s perception of racial groups. White people appear more often than all other groups combined, are represented through discernible stereotypes and advertise nearly all product categories. By contrast, blacks and non-Japanese Asians are associated with a narrower range. The former appear as musicians and athletes; the latter are either famous celebrities or associated with products from their countries of origin. These ‘Others’ are often stereotyped in ways that differentiate them from Japanese. Overall, this article provides insight into the attitudes of the Japanese toward ‘Others’, contributing both to the long-standing discourse of Japanese exceptionalism ( nihonjinron) and the understanding of Japanese society in a globalizing world.

The Zen of Anarchy: Japanese Exceptionalism and the Anarchist Roots of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance

AbstractThis essay explores the political origins and implications of Beat Zen anarchism, a cultural phenomenon located in the intersection between American anarchist traditions and Zen Buddhism in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Focusing on the writings of D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, it shows how Beat Zen emerged not primarily from an Orientalist appropriation of “the East” but rather from an Occidentalist, Japanese-centered criticism of American materialism that followed from the complex legacy of the World’s Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. In staking their claims to Zen, in other words, Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder—the Beat poets on whom this essay focuses—along with Alan Watts expressed the views not of cultural imperialists, as one might suppose, but of converts to what they regarded as a superior way of life.The Beat adoption of Zen intersected with a broadly libertarian and specifically anarchist social milieu in San Francisco that congregated around Kenneth Roxroth's Libertarian Club and Anarchist Circle. The individualist, anti-statist, and anarchist political outlooks of Beat Zen anarchists were directly confirmed by the writings of D. T. Suzuki, who presented Zen as a practice of personal liberation from cultural conditioning. Suzuki's rhetorical approach—which treated Japanese Zen as both a pinnacle of Asian civilization and a key to the liberation of Western humanity from its stifling and destructive rationalism—was informed by Meiji-era Japanese nationalism and exceptionalism and by the universalism that Buddhist missionaries brought to their explanations of Zen to Westerners. Arguing that Beat Zen poets, in adopting Buddhism as it was presented to them, were foremost Occidentalist rather than Orientalist in outlook, this essay concludes that the Beat Zen anarchist cultural formation suggests a libertarian alternative to Orientalism and also reconfigures common conceptions of American radical literary history as primarily Marxistinflected.

Critiquing the Idea of Japanese Exceptionalism: Japan and the Coordination of North Korea Policy

AbstractThe idea that Japan is playing an 'alternative role' in its foreign policy—that it is keeping a 'conspicuously low profile' and that its stance is in some sense 'unique'—has been a recurring theme of analysis of Japanese foreign policy. This article aims to critique this idea of Japanese exceptionalism, epitomised for instance in the 'aikido state' metaphor. By analysing Japan's role in the Six-Party Talks—arguably a suitable case for testing this metaphor—the article concludes that, far from keeping a low profile, Tokyo has exercised obstructive power over other actors involved in the talks. This conclusion is substantiated by comparison with Tokyo's role in other important instances of North Korea policy coordination over the period 1993–2002. By comparing Japanese behaviour with that of the USA, China, Russia and North Korea, the article concludes, furthermore, that the concepts of 'obstructionism' and 'power' facilitate understanding of their behaviour as well—with the implication that Japan's foreign policy is not so unique.

Japanese Childhood, Modern Childhood: The Nation-State, the School, and 19th-Century Globalization

Japan's initial encounter with globalization was also its encounter with moderni? ty.1 ln the midto late-19th century, Western imperialism in Asia plunged Japan into a new system of international relations, generating an unprecedented vol? ume of interactions with other parts of the world. Most consequential for Japan were those interactions with the United States and Europe, for they brought to Japan, through a process of hegemony, the constellation of ideas and institu? tions central to the experience of modernity. Of interest here are three closely related points in this constellation: the political formation of the nation-state, the institution of the school, and a concept of childhood as distinct stage of life worthy of public discussion.2 Japanese leaders during the early decades of Meiji period (1868-1912) believed that the source of Western power?and the key to Japan's national survival in the face of Western imperialism?lay in the nationstate's capacity for mobilizing human resources. When they set about creating institutions to accomplish this goal, they recognized the particular importance of the school, which extended the project of mobilization to Japanese children. ln turn, they opened up the child to public inquiry, generating within an emerg? ing mass society a new awareness of childhood?an awareness informed by an international discussion among social reformers in Europe and the United States about the problems facing urban, industrialized societies. The creation of mod? ern childhood in Japan thus provides a case study by which we can trace how pre-existing local conceptions of childhood were transformed by an engagement with the field of ideas and institutions that began to circulate globally during the 19 th century. Using Japan as a case study for examining global themes or processes is a timehonored endeavor. For the first few decades following World War Two, the pro? cess under scholarly consideration was not globalization, but a concept equally grand in scope: modernization. As the only non-Western country to have modernized, Japan was the focus of intense interest from scholars seeking to develop a universal model of the process by which societies become modern. The impli? cations of this scholarship were presumed to be global?after all, the context for this Cold War-era scholarship was the effort to present to unaligned develop? ing countries a non-Communist path to modernity. Yet because these scholars tended to see societies as organic, self-contained units and modernization as internally-generated (though manifested globally), they often studied Japan in isolation. They also tended to emphasize the role of Japan's cultural values in facilitating and shaping its modernization, thus contributing to assumptions of Japanese exceptionalism that remain dominant outside of academia.3 In the last decade or so, historians have contested this notion of uniqueness by

Political Traditions and Political Change: The Significance of Postwar Japanese Politics for Political Science

The extensive literature on postwar Japanese politics often stresses unique phenomena representative of Japanese exceptionalism, even though both Japanists and specialists on other areas of the world would profit from integrating Japanese political studies with broader comparative themes. This review seeks to correct a tendency toward scholarly isolation by addressing four themes in Japanese postwar experience and relating them to comparative political science research on other countries and regions. The four themes are styles of electoral mobilization, informalism and process as factors in party organization, power and performance in postwar policy making, and post-1993 electoral institution change.

The Emergence of a Labor-Management Settlement in Japan, 1945–1960

This brief paper offers some comparatively conceived observations on what we might call the postwar Japanese social contract, an arrangement ham mered out by the 1960s in the unionized portion of the private sector and later extended to unionized public sector workers. I write from the worm's eye vantage point of someone who has surveyed in some detail the general history of labor and management in Japan, and dug deeply into the history of one steel mill in particular from 1945 through the first oil crisis, while having superficially surveyed the American and some European cases. My focus is on what I see as the formative period for Japan's social contract, the 1950s and early 1960s. I argue the case for a perhaps counterintuitive form of Japanese exceptionalism. That is, I see Japan's labor-management settlement in the postwar era as exceptional not in the sense of being distorted or incomplete; rather, it represents the most durable and deeply entrenched of the postwar social contracts. Explaining this durability is the job of a comparatively challenged historian who studies Japan. Explaining the failure to endure could then be a task for historians focused on other national cases.