RETHINKING JAPANESE STUDIES: Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region | Edited by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto
Routledge Contemporary Japan Series. London; New York: Routledge, 2018. xii, 231 pp. (Tables, illustrations.) US$150.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-06850-6.
Two deficiencies stalk most edited collections of conference papers: the dissolution of the conference’s interactive energy, and a mixture of disjointed, uneven contributor papers. Both are evident in Rethinking Japanese Studies, a collection from the 2015 meeting of the Japan Studies Association of Australia. Nonetheless, the book makes noteworthy contributions and contains some intriguing findings. It explores the origins, impact, and emerging alternatives to Eurocentrism in Japanese studies, largely within the Asia-Pacific region. Contributors also touch on issues of global knowledge production, the international stratification of academia, and Asia-Pacific scholarship, thus reaching beyond a narrow focus of Japanese studies within the Asia Pacific.
The collection has a clear structure. Between a strong, synthetic introductory chapter by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto’s insightful closing chapter, the chapters fall into three clusters. The first three-chapter cluster looks at Japanese studies within Japan. Eiji Oguma outlines the evolution of Japanese studies by non-Japanese scholars, then explains why scholarship within Japan is extremely insular. Japan’s unusually large publishing industry, a closed and self-referencing academic system, and large rewards for publishing in Japanese for Japan’s well-educated public are the primary culprits. Next, Lidia Tanaka describes the dual system of Japanese-language study, kokugo and nihongo. The former emphasizes classic Japanese texts and has a constricted, inner focus, while the latter emphasizes teaching Japanese to non-native speakers and forging linkages with the international linguistics community. Tomoko Aoyama’s chapter on literature finds a similar duality between kokukungaku and nihon bungaku. The former emerged during the Meiji era and has been associated with ethnocentric-nationalist ideologies while the latter is a mid-twentieth-century phenomenon that seeks integration with international literary discourses. This cluster of chapters describes a sharp divide in Japan between highly insular and globally oriented scholars.
The second three-chapter cluster examines Japanese studies in the Asia-Pacific region. Leng Leng Thang documents the growth of Japanese studies in Southeast Asian countries with the Japan Foundation’s financial support and observes that diverse nation-specific trajectories developed, all starting with language study. A failure to build strong intra-regional linkages that extend outside the region is lamented. Duck-Young Lee offers an extensive quantitative and historical study of Japanese studies in South Korea. Korea’s ex-colonial status and its domestic politics account for the late arrival of Japanese studies (1980s). Of interest is Lee’s observation that unlike elsewhere, most South Korean Japanese studies scholars complete their advanced training in Japan and publish in Japanese. Carolyn S. Steven’s chapter provides a detailed history of Japanese studies in Australia and its academic journals. This cluster’s theme is the fragmentation of Japanese studies scholarship within the Asia-Pacific region.
The third cluster contains two case studies of transnational research. Bu Ping offers an account of how historians from China, South Korea, and Japan overcame political tensions and nation-specific interests to collaborate on an East Asian history project. Vera Mack describes a Modern Girl in East Asia project produced by a collaborative research team from Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. These two projects highlight both the rarity and benefits of inter-Asian cross-national cooperative research.
Some readers may be disappointed in the book’s limited focus. With a few exceptions, contributors present Eurocentrism as a monolithic “straw man” that ignores research generated in the periphery. Despite vague calls for greater global interchange, only the chapters by Okano, Oguma, and Sugimoto present rigorous cases for advancing non-Eurocentric scholarship. Situating area studies within general knowledge production activities or identifying concerns that Japanese studies shares with other area studies fields are largely absent. In addition, the collection displays little consensus about the boundaries of Japanese studies. Some authors treat Japanese-language study and any research on any Japanese-related topic as being part of Japanese studies. However, other authors consider the term Japanese studies to only apply to research that non-Japanese humanities and social-science scholars conduct on Japan-focused topics.
Several key findings emerge from this collection. First, over the past seventy-five years, the field of Japanese studies has evolved through three “paradigms.” Geopolitical and macro-level economic factors, such as the Cold War, that influenced knowledge production in the Eurocentric “core” also profoundly shaped the field. Such factors account for the field’s Eurocentric orientation, its use of English as the medium of communication, and its hierarchy of publication outlets and PhD training centres. Second, Japanese-language study and Japan-related humanities and social-science research developed unevenly and tend to mimic Eurocentric knowledge production. Third, much of the scholarship by Japanese academics retains a restricted, internal focus and remains isolated from the world’s knowledge community. Japan-specific concepts and experiences are rarely included in the hegemonic universalism of Eurocentrism. Lastly, several alternatives to Eurocentrism are on the horizon but all are yet to be realized. These include collaboration across national academic communities within the Asia-Pacific region, “Asia as Method” (see C.K. Chen, Asia as Method, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), or a “cosmopolitan method” that Sugimoto outlines in the last chapter.
Sugimoto’s “cosmopolitan method” is a promising alternative to Eurocentrism. It goes beyond both centrist and nativist methodologies by incorporating a mix of etic and emic concepts and using inductive theory building. It shares a striving for universal knowledge with Eurocentrism but encourages flexibility and does not hold universalism as a rigid principle.
W. Lawrence Neuman
University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, USA
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