Narratives Of Japan Research Articles

Showcasing Japan A Journey of Japanese Identity through Archaeology and Ancient Art Exhibitions in Italy

To what extent does the narrative of Japan’s prehistorical origins matter to Italy? In the second half of the twentieth century, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome hosted two significant exhibitions dedicated to Japanese archaeology and ancient art: Tesori dell’Arte Giapponese in 1958 and Il Giappone prima dell’Occidente in 1995. Both displays provided Italian visitors with an unparalleled framework to engage with early artistic manifestations of the archipelago known today as Japan. Built on a critical analysis of the prehistoric and protohistoric artefacts from the Jōmon to Kofun periods selected for the Italian audience, this paper examines the active application of narrative discourse on Japan’s identity by the Japanese government in Italy. Still, it also sheds light on the presence of Japanese archaeology and art in Italian public and private collections throughout the twentieth century. The analysis delves into the textual and visual presentation of exhibits, examining both the venue and catalogues. These sources offer insights into potential instances of orientalism or self-orientalism, revealing a narrative closely tied to stereotypical views. The investigation unravels aspects of Japan’s past emphasised in diplomatic shows, evolving alongside ground-breaking archaeological discoveries in post-war Japan.

Sports mega-events and cosmopolitan nationalism: A critical discourse analysis of media representations of Japan through the 2019 Rugby World Cup

Sports mega-events, like the Rugby World Cup, are often considered as a major platform for the celebration and reinforcement of nationalism. However, there is an emerging strand of research which contends that the host nations are increasingly presenting themselves with diverse, inclusive and cosmopolitan characteristics and, in turn, forms of nationalism have undergone some noticeable changes in more recent times. In this paper, we pursue an argument that Japan as the host of the 2019 Rugby World Cup projected the nation with a cosmopolitan outlook ultimately to sustain or even strengthen national interest and identity through the process of ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’. Methodologically, the research deployed critical discourse analysis to examine media representations of Japan as the host nation in general, and its national team in particular, within one of the leading Japanese newspapers as well as a range of other publicly available resources and materials in relation to the Rugby World Cup. In result, the study reveals the ways in which the discourse of ‘One Team’, embracement of foreignness and incidents of international exchanges during the event were mobilised to generate ‘thin’ cosmopolitan moments and, at the same time, were incorporated into the narratives of Japan's success on the world stage through conditional acceptance of foreignness and diversity. Consequently, this paper offers both a theoretical underpinning for and empirical evidence of the emerging linkage between sports mega-events and cosmopolitan nationalism.

Representing the Silk Road: Literature and Images between China and Japan during the Cold War

The essay focused on the TV documentary series The Silk Road and discussed the significance of this co-production between China and Japan. Two television stations, NHK and CCTV, provided each other with technical support to create a new image of the Silk Road in 1980. They attempted to rediscover the cultural relationship in Asia. Japanese Oriental studies were either the base for this co-production or the source of trouble. CCTV needed to utilize and overcome Japanese technology and the resources from Oriental studies, to represent national culture and identity through images. On the other hand, Japan once again sought ways to represent the Asian “others.” However, the challenge was making it relative to Orientalism and imperialism. This essay also compares the two versions and suggests that both ancient Asian cultural histories that they represented through images reflected the contemporaneous political situation of the Cold War. In CCTV’s version, the images of the Silk Road became a symbol of the re-establishment of China’s national identity, including the imagination of a “multi-ethnic state” and a “community of cultural memory that unites East and West”. Furthermore, this version also represented the trade with neighboring states. Each of these elements had a realistic role in the political environment of 1980. On the other hand, NHK’s version contains a narrative to prove Japan is the last stop on the Silk Road. Moreover, before this documentary, Japanese literature had long sought the “unknown” of the Silk Road and became a strong intellectual foundation for The Silk Road. The narrative of Japan “being a part of the Silk Road, but unlike in colonialism, as a traveler” is what Yasushi Inoue repeatedly expressed in his literary works and appeared to have been passed on through the images of the documentary. Carrying the negative legacy of Japanese imperialism, then being caught between the United States and the Socialist bloc, and having a difficult choice of political identity, Japanese intellectuals refrained from expressing their political positions and chose to describe cultural history from the “traveler’s” perspective. This essay suggests this is an attempt to redefine Japan on the cultural map of Asia and indirectly to break through the polarization of capitalism and socialism in the Cold War.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Development of Stories through Film

ABSTRACT Using materials from the Kazuo Ishiguro archives located in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, this article explores Ishiguro’s unpublished film-related works – his Japanese ghost documentary film project, scriptwriting experiments for The Remains of the Day, and reviews for films – in close relation to his major novels to reflect on the cinematic influence found in his writing. I argue that his scriptwriting and thoughts about film helped Ishiguro create a type of composite universe in which illusions from individual memory and national history reflect each other and where narratives of Japan and Britain are connected with those of the world.

Negotiating the nation: public diplomacy and the publication of English-language tourist guidebooks of Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912)

Tourist guidebooks are powerful instruments of public diplomacy: as supposedly ‘impersonal’ descriptions, intended for ‘average’ readers, they can be used to subtly promote careful national narratives, and to draw the attention of foreign publics to a country’s soft power. This article analyses, in this light, the English-language tourist guidebooks of Japan published by the Society called Kihinkai (Welcome Society, 1893–1912), the earliest Japanese organization for the promotion of inbound tourism. It relates them to the popular handbooks of Japan published by the British House of Murray, which were adopted as their model. Murray’s handbooks ‘created’ Japan as an international tourist destination for a majority of English-speaking travellers, responding to common travel tropes and expectations about the country. The Kihinkai’s guidebooks engaged with them in the form of ‘autoethnographic’ texts, adopting their style and language, as a way to partake in their established reputation of authoritativeness. At the same time, they carefully reframed their narrative of Japan, in a way that was coherent with the Kihinkai’s general ‘diplomatic’ strategy – born of the background of its founders and supporters, and of the coming together of private and public sector interests.

Japan’s demands for reforms of UNESCO’s Memory of the World: the search for mnemonical security

This study focuses on the policy response of the Abe government (2012–present) to UNESCO’s inscription of the ‘Documents of Nanjing Massacre’ to argue that the historical revisionists’ perspective is central to the thinking of Japan’s UNESCO diplomacy. The UNESCO’s inscription heightened a sense of shame from the viewpoint of Japanese historical revisionists, leading the Japanese government to the unprecedented step of using its economic power to reform UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme and to prevent further inscription of historical documents that go against the view of the government. Because UNESCO constitutes the existing biographical narrative of Japan as a peace-loving, law-abiding country, the Japanese government remains careful to maintain a good-will posture to UNESCO. This article highlights the case of Japan to illustrate the importance of memory and identity change, as well as of the distinction between ontological security and the removal of threat to a historical narrative.

Reconstructing hierarchy as the key international relations concept and its implications for the study of Japanese national identity

AbstractFor the last few decades, the discipline of international relations has been littered with anarchy. Since Waltz'sTheory of International Politics, it has been assumed that states are formally equal sovereign unitary actors operating in an anarchic world system and that their identities and interests are defined by the very existence of anarchy. This article shatters this conception. It offers a ‘hierarchical worldview’ in order to illustrate that the very concepts of state, sovereignty, and anarchy are discursive creations inherently tied to the practice of hierarchy. I use a case study of Japanese national identity to illustrate this practice. The narratives of Japan as an autonomous and sovereign state were inextricably linked to Japan's hierarchical relationship toward Asia and the West (pre-war) and the USA (post-war). Japan's sovereignty and autonomy were then formulated within the practice of hierarchy.

Alternative narratives of Japan in contemporary media: Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensōron

In the best-selling comic book Sensōron (1998), Kobayashi Yoshinori (b. 1953) develops his own “discourse on war” through the medium of manga, using a provocative discourse that has since been widely criticised for its potential to incite attitudes of exclusionary nationalism. Kobayashi’s discourse on the Nanjing Massacre in Sensōron criticises the illiberal tendency of Japanese media, newspaper-publishing companies in particular, to select information they prefer and distort the past by using suspicious photos and captions. It is thus of value to reconsider this war-related debate from the perspective of Ien Ang’s concept of “emotional realism,” which refers to the tendency of viewers to be moved emotionally and empathise with the human events presented by TV dramas, regardless of whether or not they are accurately grounded in historical facts. Through close readings of Sensōron and related critiques of the volume, I will examine how Kobayashi Yoshinori challenges the dominant World War II narratives in Japan, which tend to overlook the actual wartime period and instead focus on the prewar and postwar periods. Then I will argue that, although Sensōron might lack meticulous research when compared to general academic scholarship, it functions to a certain extent as an alternative voice that critically points out contemporary Japan’s neglect to reflect on World War II and apply the lessons of the past to the present.

Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle by Mark Metzler (review)

Reviewed by: Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle by Mark Metzler Steven J. Ericson (bio) Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle. By Mark Metzler. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2013. xvii, 295 pages. $49.95. Mark Metzler has written a highly original and thought-provoking book, “more of an extended essay” (p. 7) than a standard monograph, including general lessons and philosophical reflections on capitalist finance. From the start, Metzler makes clear that he is not presenting a conventional economic history, as he opens with references to Johann von Goethe’s Faust and to Goethe’s younger contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer, whose work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung inspired the book’s title. In this book, Japan in the first decade and a half after World War II serves as an empirical case study for a process of inflationary credit creation—of state authorities and private bankers “willing and imagining” money into existence—which the author suggests applies to capitalist industrial development worldwide. In the case-study chapters, Metzler offers a novel take on a cluster of Japanese economists and economic planners who shaped the key institutional mechanisms of Japan’s high-speed economic growth after World War II. The main figures he investigates are the “mediating Schumpeterians” Nakayama Ichirō, Tōhata Seiichi, and Tsuru Shigeto; the “minister of inflationary reconstruction finance” Ishibashi Tanzan; the Bank of Japan “capital creator” Ichimada Hisato; and the technocratic planners Arisawa Hiromi and Ōkita Saburō. Metzler is certainly not the first to examine these figures; but, unlike Bai Gao, Laura Hein, Scott O’Bryan,1 and others, he argues specifically that the process of economic recovery and growth these experts helped establish in postwar Japan exemplified in sharp relief the ideas on industrial finance of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who during the interwar period had personally mentored several of these men in Europe or in the United States. Others have mentioned the influence in Japan of Schumpeter’s well-known theories on innovation and entrepreneurship; Metzler, however, focuses on the Austrian’s “Faustian” concept of banks’ inflationary creation of money “out of nothing” as the driver of capitalist industrial development. According to Metzler, this concept, which Japanese economists embraced from the start but their Anglo-American [End Page 519] counterparts have mostly forgotten or ignored, explains the mechanism by which Japan financed its postwar recovery and “miracle.” The book requires some patience in navigating, as it begins with globalhistorical and theoretical chapters sandwiching a chapter introducing the principal characters—including Schumpeter and his Japanese acolytes—before turning to the analysis of Japan’s postwar experience. Throughout, Metzler underscores Schumpeter’s century-old insight that the inflationary creation of credit, primarily by banks, is “the financial fountainhead of modern capitalist development” (p. 1). The inflation caused by the operation of banks’ manufacturing money and lending it to industries through “bookkeeping entries” produces “forced savings” from the wider society; as Metz ler puts it, “modern money in the broad sense used by economists is mainly created by private banks in the act of lending money they do not yet ‘have’” (p. 211). Japan’s postwar planners clearly understood this process, stating in the Economic Planning Agency’s 1957 White Paper that, “from the viewpoint of banks as a whole, something is created from nothing” (p. 190). Furthermore, such paper credits act as “orders”—new claims to existing goods and services—so that, as Schumpeter saw it, “banks under capitalism functionally resembled a state planning board under socialism” (p. 47). Schumpeter’s emphasis on “the indicative aspect of capital” (p. 46) seems to have enhanced the appeal of his dynamic, developmental approach in the eyes of Japan’s postwar economic planners, who learned from the failure of deflationary stabilization in the interwar period and built on techniques of the wartime “controlled economy” to manage a successful “inflationary stabilization” after World War II. A recurring, critical theme of the book has to do with the causal relationship between investment and savings. Narratives of Japan’s postwar economic performance invariably point to stratospheric rates of investment and household savings as key factors behind the economic...

Japan’s Growing Hard Hedge Against China

As China accumulates more power, Japan is often overlooked as being capable of affecting China’s continued trajectory because of material differences and narratives of Japan being a reactive state. Yet, Beijing’s strategic planning cannot ignore Tokyo because Japan has the ability to affect the region’s security environment. Feeling its presence and influence becoming relatively smaller, Tokyo has been increasingly proactive in its effort to expand its strategic space and shape the regional environment in ways conducive to its interests. A review of Japan’s approach to China since 1972 reveals that it has shifted away from its traditional engagement policy toward first a soft hedge, followed by a harder hedge that continues to this day. Today’s mix of partnerships and capabilities enable Japan to complicate China’s freedom of action and frustrate its continued rise.

Revisiting narratives of Meiji ‘progress’: Seiji Shōsetsu as sexual and political opposition

In 1890, as Japan celebrated national unity through the opening of the Imperial Diet, Hara Hōitsuan's Secret Politician (Anchū seijika, 1890) spotlighted the government's violent suppression of opposition voices in the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement of the 1880s. Much more than just a notable embodiment of the contestatory nature of the creation of the modern Japanese nation-state, Secret Politician also punctuates the end of the period of political novels (seiji shōsetsu) with a provocative evocation of male-male sexuality (nanshoku). Loyal bonds among government-declared criminals on trial at the end of the novel are framed within the sexualized language and associations of love-pacts between warriors, while the state is depicted as a deplorable villain lacking fidelity to its male citizenry. Secret Politician's oppositional stance nevertheless reinforced a growing trend that envisioned the Japanese nation as overwhelmingly masculine, a trend that not only bolstered the very state Hara sought to challenge but also had far-reaching consequences for women. This article argues that Secret Politician's significance lies in its representation of the Meiji period's shifting boundaries of literature and politics and contentious struggle to define sexuality and gender that are obfuscated by grand narratives of Japan's smooth and natural ‘progress’ towards ‘civilization’.

Narratives of Counter-Modernity: Urban Spaces and Mnemonic Sites in the Tôkyô Hanjôki

It is common to associate the emergence of modern mass culture with the modernising city. In Japan the discourse on cities focuses to a large extent on Tokyo because of its role as national capital. Capital cities in particular are both political and symbolic centres of the nation and in many cases also centres of production and consumption. Very often narratives of Japan's modernity are linked with the question of how Tokyo became the political centre of the nation on the one hand and how modernization changed urban spaces on the other. There exists a huge body of journalistic and feuilleton-like texts on Tokyo addressing the needs of the urban masses for information about city life. A lot of these texts had a wide circulation when they had been published but as most of them are not categorized as 'novels' (shosetsu), i.e., 'high culture', they have received but scarce attention from scholars. An important example of such kinds of texts are the Tokyo hanjoki (Reports on the prosperity of Tokyo), a genre that is rooted in the popular culture of the late Edo period. I here explore two representative examples, the Saishin Tokyo hanjoki (The Most Up-to-Date Report on the Prosperity of Tokyo; 1903) and the Dai Tokyo hanjoki (Report on the Prosperity of Greater Tokyo; 1928) in order to find out how the specific experience of Tokyo's modernity is conceptualized there. Published at important stages in Japan's process of modernization, both texts reveal images of Tokyo which open up important angles on mass situation and the experience of modern city life at different points of time. Particular emphasis will be laid on the question of what kind of knowledge about urban life and culture is transmitted and what kinds of urban spaces are mainly represented.

Narratives of Counter-Modernity: Urban Spaces and Mnemonic Sites in the Tôkyô Hanjôki

It is common to associate the emergence of modern mass culture with the modernising city. In Japan the discourse on cities focuses to a large extent on Tokyo because of its role as national capital. Capital cities in particular are both political and symbolic centres of the nation and in many cases also centres of production and consumption. Very often narratives of Japan’s modernity are linked with the question of how Tokyo became the political centre of the nation on the one hand and how modernization changed urban spaces on the other. There exists a huge body of journalistic and feuilleton-like texts on Tokyo addressing the needs of the urban masses for information about city life. A lot of these texts had a wide circulation when they had been published but as most of them are not categorized as ‘novels’ (shôsetsu), i.e., ‘high culture’, they have received but scarce attention from scholars. An important example of such kinds of texts are the Tôkyô hanjôki (Reports on the prosperity of Tokyo), a genre that is rooted in the popular culture of the late Edo period. I here explore two representative examples, the Saishin Tôkyô hanjôki (The Most Up-to-Date Report on the Prosperity of Tokyo; 1903) and the Dai Tôkyô hanjôki (Report on the Prosperity of Greater Tokyo; 1928) in order to find out how the specific experience of Tokyo’s modernity is conceptualized there. Published at important stages in Japan’s process of modernization, both texts reveal images of Tokyo which open up important angles on mass situation and the experience of modern city life at different points of time. Particular emphasis will be laid on the question of what kind of knowledge about urban life and culture is transmitted and what kinds of urban spaces are mainly represented.

Baby you can Drive my Bed: Technology and Old Age in Japanese Animated Film

Narratives of Japan's maturation as a postindustrial society raise critical interest in narratives of personal and collective maturation within the most rapidly aging population in the world. Japanese popular culture is a rich source of representations of tensions between institutional projects of modernization and significant cultural and social changes that these projects have unintentionally engendered. The animated movie Rōjin-Z represents the tensions between the experience of old age and high technology and draws attention to how technologies of care are not always socially and culturally attuned to personal biographies. This article proposes linkages between representations of old age, postmodernization of the life course, and structural changes shaped by information technologies in contemporary Japan.