CC. The Larger Context

		‘The Japan we must live with at the end of the twentieth century has grown too important to be left to the mercy of clichès.’

10. Littlewood, Ian. The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths. London: Secker & Warburg, 1996.

Littlewood’s is the most ambitious and readable of several books on this subject (see also 4, 7, and 12) and as perceptive as any. Traces persistent European ‘myths’ about Japan through the centuries, drawing on material ranging from sixteenth-century travelogues to recent advertising campaigns for beer and automobiles and the ‘ninja blockbusters’ of Eric Lustbader. The thesis is partly that the images have not changed notably through the years. Behind the ‘primary image of an essential, unchanging Japan’ are four others that have persisted from the beginning, and which provide the thematic organisation of the work in sections called ‘Aliens’, ‘Aesthetes’, ‘Butterflies’, and ‘Samurai’. Ultimately Littlewood’s aim is didactic, for the ‘Japan we must live with at the end of the twentieth century has grown too important to be left to the mercy of clichès’. Includes discussion of Kipling (see CA1), Edwin Arnold (CA1), Mitford (D4), Chamberlain (D5), Percival Lowell (D6), Hearn (D9), Pierre Loti (Ap), and Ernest Satow (Ap), and passing reference to Noyes (CA2) and Plomer.