Special Lecture II:
Orientalism, Modernism, and the Special Case of Japan

Korakuen campus, autumn term, Monday 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 series of lectures will explore the historical and 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).

The course will consist of nine lectures, each approximately sixty minutes, to each of which students will respond with a short reaction paper:

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

Students should please note that this is not an English class, but rather a series of lectures that will be given in English, supplemented by texts in English, and examined by means of English reaction papers and a final examination in English

Supplemental 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).