Orientalism, Modernism, and Japan

Korakuen campus, autumn term, Tuesday 4:35~6:05

Once a landscape has been established, its origins are repressed from memory. It takes on the appearance of an “object” which has been there, outside us, from the start. An “object,” however, can only be constituted within a landscape. The same may be said of the “subject” or self. The philosophical standpoint which distinguishes between subject and object came into existence within what I refer to as a “landscape.” Rather than existing prior to landscape, subject and object emerge from within it.

Karatani Kôjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

This seminar will explore the cultural relation of Japan and the West, particularly France, Britain, and the United States. The historical focus will be July 1853, when Matthew Perry arrived at Uraga with his men-of-war, to August 1914, when the “long nineteenth-century” ended, the world entered what Eric Hobsbawm has called The Age of Extremes, and in the eyes of the West Japan had risen “from the rank of a petty and despised Oriental State” to become “the peer of the Great Powers of the Occident” (Times [London], 30 July 1912).

Time permitting, we shall focus on eight topics:

1. Orientalism as Practice
2. Orientalism as Theory
3. The Legacy of Seclusion
4. Making History: Meiji Japan and the West
5. Modern Japan and the Discovery of Landscape
6. The Landscape and the Position of the Observer
7. Orientalists and Modernists
8. The Internalized Eye of the West

Texts will include:

Edward Said, Orientalism (1978).

Hiroshi Yoshioka, “Samurai and Self-Colonization in Japan” (1993).

David Ewick, “Orientalism, Absence, and Quick-Firing Guns: The Emergence of Japan as a Western Text” (2003).