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In Japan in the World, distinguished scholars, novelists, and intellectuals articulate how Japan - despite unprecedented economic prowess in securing dominance in the world's market - is caught in a complex dependency with the Untied States. Drawing on critical and postmodernist theory, this timely volume situates this dependency in a broader historical context and assesses Japan's current dealings in international politics, society, and culture.
List of contents
Japan in the World / Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian 1
The World
Japan's Industrial Revolution in Historical Perspective / Tetsuo Najita 13
The Prussia of the East? / Perry Anderson 31
Racism and the State: The Coming Crisis of U.S.-Japanese Relations / Eqbal Ahmad 40
"Past Experience, If Not Forgotten, Is a Guide to the Future": or, What Is in a Text? The Politics of History in Chinese-Japanese Relations / Arif Dirlik 49
Archaeology, Descent, Emergence: Japan in British/American Hegemony, 1900–1950 / Bruce Cumings 79
Society
Constructing a New Cultural History of Prewar Japan / Miriam Silverberg 115
The Spirit of Productivity: Workplace Discourse on Culture and Economics in Japan / Christena Turner 144
Culture
The Novelist in Today's World: A Conversation / Kazuo Isiguro and Eo Kenzaburo 163
Soseki and Western Modernism / Fredric R. Jameson 177
America's Japan/Japan's Japan / H. D. Harootunian 186
In a Labyrinth of Western Desire: Kuki Shuzo and the Discovery of Japanese Being / Leslie Pincus 222
Return to the West/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsuro's Anthropology and Discussions of Authenticity / Naoki Sakai 237
The Invention of English Literature in Japan / Masao Miyoshi 271
Theory's Imaginal Other: American Encounters with South Korea and Japan / Rob Wilson 316
The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Postcolonial World Order / Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto 338
Index 355
Contributors 363
About the author
At the time of his death in 2009, Masao Miyoshi was Professor of Japanese, English, and Comparative Literature at the Univesity of California, San Diego. He is coeditor, with Fredric Jameson, of The Cultures of Globalization, also published by Duke University Press.
H. D. Harootunian is Director of the Program in East Asian Studies at New York University.
