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“You Asians”: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia BinarySakai, Naoki, 1946-

The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 99, Number 4, Fall 2000,pp. 789-817 (Article)

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Naoki Sakai

‘‘You Asians’’: On the Historical Role of theWest and Asia Binary

Partly because of the consequences of acceler-ating globalization and the emergence of what,for the last decade or two, a number of peoplehave referred to as the postmodern conditionsdiscernible almost everywhere on the globe, weare urged to acknowledge that the unity of theWest is far from being unitarily determinable.The West is a mythical construct, indeed, yetwhat we believe we understand by this mythemeis increasingly ambiguous and incongruous; itsimmoderately overdetermined nature can nolonger be shrouded.

Until recently the indigenous or local char-acteristic of a social and cultural constructfound in places in Asia, Africa, and sometimesLatin America has routinely been earmarked incontrast to some generalized and euphemisticquality specified as being ‘‘Western.’’ Withoutthis institutionalized gesture whereby to iden-tify what is allegedly unfamiliar, enigmatic, orbarbaric for those who fashion themselves tobe ‘‘Westerners’’ in terms of the Western/non-Western binary opposition, it would be im-possible to understand the initial formation ofAsian studies as a set of academic disciplines in

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North American academia. Things Asiatic were brought to scholarly atten-tion by being recognized as ‘‘di&erent and therefore Asian.’’ Then, tacitlyfrom the putative viewpoint called ‘‘the West,’’ ‘‘being di&erent from us’’ and‘‘being Asian’’ were taken to be synonymous in its anthropologizing ges-ture. A regiment was in e&ect according to which an acknowledgment ofallegedly unfamiliar, enigmatic, or barbaric things was immediately a rec-ognition of one’s positionality as a Westerner. A similar operation could wellbe performed with Africa or Latin America, so as to identify Africa or LatinAmerica as belonging to the Rest of the World, the rest that is left over whenthe humanity of the West is strenuously extracted from the world.

Let me begin my essay with a brief meditation on the term Asia and thepeople who call themselves Asians. Instead of speaking from the usual view-point of ‘‘we Westerners’’—a customary addresser stance when one writesin English in the United States—let me address myself from the contrastingposition of ‘‘we Asians.’’ For those who fashion themselves as Asians, theword Asians is implicitly we Asians and serves as a vocative of a first-personplural pronoun that self-reflectively designates a group of people whose pri-mary commonality is supposed to consist of ‘‘being of Asia.’’

But, who are the people who call themselves Asians? Or, more fundamen-tally, where is Asia? What is it?

I am not sure to what extent one can seriously claim today that Asia is,first of all, a cartographic index. Nonetheless it is widely believed that Asiais a certain proper name that indicates a vast geographic area with its hugeresident population. Accordingly, some people might without reflection as-sume that those who live in the geographic area called Asia are naturallydesignated as the Asians.

The population inhabiting the area called Asia is called the Asians. Fromthis, however, it does not necessarily follow that the people thus calledAsians are able to gather themselves together and build some solidarityamong themselves through the act of their self-representation or auto-representation by enunciating not only we but also we Asians. Clearly thereis a wide gap between the fact that the population is described as Asiansby some observers standing outside the population—we will inquire intothe conceptual specificity of this ‘‘outside’’ or externality later—and the self-assertion by the people themselves in terms of the name attributed to them.Some sort of leap is required in order to move from the state of being de-scribed as Asians by some outside agents to the self-representation as a sub-

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ject in terms of we Asians. And let us not be negligent of a historical veritythat this leap could not be made until the twentieth century.Until then, gen-erally speaking, there were objects designated as Asians but there were nosubjects who represented themselves by calling themselves Asians. Only inthe late nineteenth century a few intellectuals began to advocate the plausi-bility of constituting the transnational and regional subjectivity of Asia. Inthis respect one can never overlook the particular genealogy of Asia, thatthe name Asia originated outside Asia, and that its heteronomous origin isindubitably inscribed in the concept of Asia, even if it can by no means betaken as a geographic or cartographic locality.

It is well known that the word Asia was coined by the Europeans in orderto distinguish Europe from its eastern others, in the protocol of constitutingitself as a sort of territorial unity. It was a term in the service of the con-stitution of Europe’s self-representation as well as its distinction. Asia wasnecessary for Europe because, without positing it, Europe could not havebeen marked as a distinct and distinguishable unity.Yet as the putative unityof Europe is inherently unstable and constantly changing, Asia has been de-fined and redefined according to contingent historical situations in whichrelationships between Europe and its others have undergone vicissitudes.

Since the nineteenth century there have been an increasing number ofoccasions when the West was used almost as a synonym for Europe. Themytheme West came to assume a global currency. Clearly the West neithersignifies nor refers to the same thing as the word Europe. Yet in its para-digmatic discriminatory function, the West began to behave like Europe. Inother words, Asia was placed in a similar opposition to the West as it hadbeen to Europe.

Today Asia is not necessarily subjugated to the domination of the West.Most of the Asian countries are, at least in theory, independent of theirformer colonizers. Yet we are still not justified in overlooking the endur-ing historical truth that Asia arrived at its self-consciousness thanks to theWest’s or Europe’s colonization, as Takeuchi Yoshimi, a sinologist special-izing in modern Chinese literature, asserted more than a half-century ago.1

The historical colonization of Asia by the West is not something acciden-tal to the essence of Asia; it is essential to the possibility called Asia. In-sofar as the post of postcoloniality is not confused with ‘‘that which comesafter’’ in chronological ordering, Asia was a postcolonial entity from the out-set. Takeuchi’s insight was particularly penetrating because he had to ad-

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dress the problem of modernity and modern subjectivity from the vantagepoint of a specific historical question: How could a Japanese intellectual, asan Asian person, still speak about modernity in Asia after Japan’s defeat orafter what the Japanese had done to people in Asia during the fifteen-yearAsia Pacific War?

Negativity, without which the reflectivity necessary for self-consciousnesscannot be achieved, never originated in Asia, and the absence of negativitywas certainly implied in Takeuchi’s word defeat (haiboku). Following thetenets of the Hegelian dialectic, Maruyama Masao, Takeuchi’s contempo-rary, attempted to show that the moment of negativity could be discerned inJapanese thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whereas theChinese never succeeded in giving rise to their own negativity.2 Implicit inMaruyama’s wartime historiography, which justified Japan’s political superi-ority over China, was the old thesis of ‘‘flight from Asia, entry into Europe,’’which meant that Japan should be capable of modernizing itself while therest of Asia must wait for the West’s initiative and that, accordingly, Japanought not to belong to Asia in that respect.

Unambiguously, with respect to the invocation of we Asians in particular,Takeuchi’s historicism was diametrically opposed to Maruyama’s, yet it isnecessary for us to acknowledge that both shared the foundational logic ofhistoricism.

Asia could never be conscious of itself before it was invaded by the West,according to Takeuchi. Only through the acknowledgment of its lost au-tonomy, of its dependence on the West, or only in the mirror of the West,so to say, could Asia reflectively acquire its civilizational, cultural, ethnic, ornational self-consciousness. The defeat is registered in the genealogy of thename itself.

Ostensibly, Asia is a proper name; nevertheless, as a sign it would be tooarbitrary unless it is paradigmatically opposed to the West (or Europe). Itsseeming reality depends on the very constitutive exclusivity, so that Westernand Asian properties/proprieties are not attributable to the same substance.The same person or thing cannot be Western and Asian at the same time.Depending on the choice of paradigmatic axis, Asia could signify a vast setof concepts, and its reference is too rich, too varied, and too full to be spe-cific. Therefore it does not possess any immanent principle with which toidentify its internal unity, either. Except for the fact that it points to a cer-tain assemblage of regions and peoples that have been objectified by and


subjugated to the West, there is nothing common in many parts of Asia. Inother words, it is impossible to talk about Asia positively. Only as the nega-tive of the West can one possibly address oneself as an Asian. Therefore totalk about Asia is invariably to talk about the West.

Takeuchi was typical of Asian and European intellectuals who had theirformative years in the %!'$s, in that he had internalized Hegelian histori-cism to such an extent that he could not project historical trajectories otherthan the historicist one in which the actualization and appropriation ofmodern values must first require the people’s radical negation of the exter-nal forces and of their internal heritage of a feudal past. He believed thatAsian modernity could be accomplished only by appropriating the essenceof Western modernity. But in order to appropriate the essence of Westernmodernity, there had to be a collective agent ‘‘nation,’’ and an Asian nationhad to resist theWest without and overcome the reactionary heritage within.In other words, Asia was to modernize itself by negating both the West out-side and its own past inside. Where there was no resistance to or negationof the West, there was no prospect of modernity for Asia. For Asia as well asfor the West, modernity meant a self-transcending project of struggle withthe remnants of the past.

Takeuchi was undoubtedly a passionate nationalist in his emotive and af-fective constitution. Unlike Maruyama Masao, another nationalist thinkerof postwar Japan, however, he diagnosed Japan’s modern history as a tellingcase where genuine negativity was absent. This perhaps is the reason for hisexcessive idealization of China. He seriously hoped that China would actual-ize a truly authentic modernity by negating the West’s domination as well asthe feudal remnants of the past, unlike Japan, which had facilely accepted theWest without resisting it, to the extent of reproducing its imperialism. Thehistorical dialectic he anticipated could not have made sense unless therehad been posited the externality of what Asia was to resist. Takeuchi wasmost adamantly opposed to the large-scale attempt to construct the regionaland transnational subjectivity, as embodied in the project of the Greater EastAsian Co-Prosperity Sphere, while decisively approving the Chinese nation-alist agenda that arose in the Chinese resistance of the Japanese invasion inEast Asia.One would probably misapprehend his commitment to modernityunless one sensed his recondite shame about his own nation’s imperialis-tic and dehumanizing maneuvers in East and Southeast Asia in the %!'$sand early %!"$s and his intense rage against U.S. imperialism, which was

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about to take over the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, in the late%!"$s. Then, for Asian peoples, modernity was considered a sort of histori-cal movement that spatially consolidated the unity and substantiality of apolitical grouping called ‘‘the nation’’ by negating external forces while tem-porally constituting itself as a subject, as an agent of self-determination, bycontinually overcoming its own past.

Operating in the background of Takeuchi’s historical assessment is avision of the historically specific division of intellectual labor in which themodern idea and institution are associated with that mythical locus ‘‘theWest’’ and are transported from there to the rest of the world. It goes with-out saying that such a vision of the global circulation of modern things is ofan imaginary nature, but it is a powerful and e&ectual social imaginary ona global scale. It prescribes and presages, as a sort of regulative machinery,what the modern world must look like. Against the background of such acartographic imaginary of the globe, the essentially colonialist distinctionbetween the West and the Rest of the World has been established and main-tained for some time, albeit with constant vicissitudes.

In Takeuchi’s diagnosis of modernity, consequently, the unity of thenation depended on the externality of what had to be resisted, which was,more often than not, mapped onto a cartographic plane as the externality ofone national sovereignty against another.What must be resisted must comefrom outside the presumed integrity of the nation, just like Japanese troopsand capital entering the Chinese territory in the Japanese invasion of China.A nation of Asia such as China was located within the reaches of the West,but the West itself was external to it. Or, more precisely, the territorial in-tegrity and the imagined unity of the nation was constituted in the act ofrepresenting the West as an external threat. The externality of what had tobe resisted had thus to be comprehended in terms of geographic distancebetween Western Europe/North America and Asia. This distance betweenthe West and Asia was further translated into the distance between politicala(liations and, finally, between the friend and the enemy; it thereby endedup mimicking, although perhaps unwittingly, the gesture of discriminatorydistancing by means of which the West constitutes itself by distinguishingAsia and the Rest of the World from itself. The feasibility that Asia could beinherent in the West was deliberately exonerated.

Takeuchi could not avoid the cartographic imaginary of the globe uponwhich modernization theory is invariably dependent although he was un-


equivocally critical of scholars who promoted the modernization theory inJapan as well as North America. A critique of Takeuchi’s historical con-sciousness, of an inherently historicist consciousness, therefore, shouldserve as our starting point for a new conception of modernity and subse-quently a new conception of the relationship between the West and Asia.3

According to the conventional historical narrative, the large-scale socialchanges in Western Europe accompanied by the emergence of modernstates, industries, and technologies are thought to mark the beginning ofmodern society. The origins of modern society are ascribed to a numberof historical precedents: the development of parliamentary politics againstthe absolutist regimes; the symptoms of industrialization in England in theeighteenth century; the formation of the bourgeois social milieu and thenew ways of organizing everyday life according to the division of the publicand the private; a series of political and social events that led to the establish-ment of a new polity legitimizing itself in the name of the people, race, ornation; the decline of mercantilism; the formation of subject as ‘‘the nation-state,’’ which produces itself by self-representation or auto-representation;and so forth.

All these precedents and the subsequent realization of modern societiesare located in a cartographic area called ‘‘the West.’’ Inversely, it is appropri-ate to say that the West is postulated as a geographic area where all thesemodern things originally started. Thereupon it is claimed that these events,which symbolize modernity, all took place within the West. Furthermore,modernity thus depicted is understood to be something that continuallyspreads; modernity emanates itself. Unlike an epidemic—the most recentcase of which no doubt is AIDS—which is usually imagined to start in aperipheral site and gradually spread to the metropolis, modernity is fanta-sized as emanating in a reverse manner from the center to the hinterlandsof the world. Therefore the consequences, influences, and e&ects of thisunitary process of social transformation that supposedly occurred strictlywithin the West are said to be detected and observed in remote areas suchas Africa, Latin America, Oceania, and of course Asia as a consequence ofmodernity’s emanation.

In due course modernity as a historical movement was represented as anemanative flow in the cartographic imaginary of the globe. Underlying thehistoricist apprehension of modernization was a certain vision of emanationwithout which the centeredness of Eurocentricity could never have been re-

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tained. Undoubtedly there is no room for the multiplicity of modernity insuch a representation. What we have routinely comprehended in terms ofmodernity and the West must be called into question because the historicistschema of the world subordinates the multiple emergence of modernitiesto the single overarching process of homogenization. The West is given riseto because modernity has not been released from its imprisonment in theemanation model.

The West is a peculiar term; it is not adequately a proper noun capableof designating some referent in its singularity beyond the sum of its de-scriptions.4 Neither is it an ordinary noun, as it is also an adjective and anadverb. Its unity is somewhat suggested by the capitalization of the w, with-out which the conventional narrative of modernization could not be sus-tained, for essentially every point on the surface of the earth is a west.Whatis overlooked in this narrative, above all, is the undeniable economic, social,cultural, ethnic, and religious heterogeneity that has continued to exist inthe geographic areas imagined to constitute the West: Western Europe,mainly bourgeois Britain and France, in the nineteenth century, with NorthAmerica being added later in the twentieth century. The examples of itsheterogeneity are easy to find: the vast population of Eastern Europe, whichis most often excluded from theWest; the African Americans who have livedgeneration after generation in the same social formations with the whiteswho fashion themselves as Westerners in the United States today; and ‘‘theAsians’’ in England who have received a lot more traditional European edu-cation than the majority of English working-class people, to mention but afew. But more importantly, also overlooked is the fact that the contour ofthe West itself is drawn by this historicist narrative of modernization. It isprecisely because it e&ectively disavows its diversity, as if its interior werecongenitally homogeneous, that the West as a social imaginary is called forin the first place.

Today the West as an analytic concept is bankrupt and generally uselessin guiding our observation about certain social formations and people’s be-havior in many loci in the world. It obscures our observation and misdirectsour comparison particularly in the cases of the social formations and cul-tural phenomena encountered in places such as Hong Kong, the UnitedStates, and Japan. With Japan being customarily located outside the West,can a comparison with the West tell you anything unique about Japaneseculture? Does Japanese anime demonstrate some distinctively non-Western


property or propriety more significant than the fact that what the individualresearcher perceives to be non-Western indicates only that the person hap-pens to be unfamiliar with it? Yet the uses of the West and Asia cannot beabolished overnight. Certain people will persist in relying on these histori-cal constructs because they have to fashion themselves in these terms andby means of their distinction from each other. By positing Asia ‘‘over there’’away from the West ‘‘this side,’’ this voyeuristic optic somewhat engenders afleeting sense of a distinction between the West and the Rest, an ephemeralextenuation for not submitting things Western to the same analytical fieldsof investigation as things Asiatic. Let us note that this voyeuristic optic,therefore, also serves as an alluring fantasy for those who feel most insecureas theWesterners.Consequently, the putative unity of theWest is barely sus-tained because they deliberately avoid submitting Western and Asian thingsto the same field of analysis. How perspectives are organized according tothis distinction thus prescribes and presages where the West is imagined tobe located and who is entitled to feel modern.

I maintain that the time of modernity is never unitary; it is always inmultiplicity. Modernity always appears in multiple histories. Yet the multi-plicity of modernity must not be understood to mean that its plural originsexist side by side in a homogeneous geographic space of the globe. Neithershould the multiplicity of histories be understood as a juxtaposition of theplural homogeneous empty temporalities of national and ethnic histories.

Although we are aware that the modernization theory is hardly sustain-able today, we are not entirely free of the binary structuring schemata thatare constantly utilized by the geopolitics of the modernization theory, withincontemporary discussions of modernity. Because such schemata reducemodernity to modernization, the representation of the world they prescribeis hierarchically organized into the West and the Rest, the modern and itsothers, the white and the colored. Worse still, these binaries are supposedto overlap.

The emanation model of modernity stems from a fundamental miscon-ception of the basic element of modernity. Modernity is inconceivable un-less there are occasions when many regions, many people, many industries,and many polities are in contact with one another despite geographic, cul-tural, and social distance. Modernity, therefore, cannot be considered unlessin reference to translation.

It is impossible to conceive of translation as an operation by which to

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establish equivalence in signification of the same text between two versionsin two languages. In other words, translation cannot be conceptualized ac-cording to the schema of communication upon which the emanation modelof modernity, for instance, is based. Translation facilitates conversation be-tween people in di&erent geographical and social loci who would otherwisenever converse with one another, but it also provides them with a spacewhere the appropriateness and validity of translation is constantly discussedand disputed. In this space we misunderstand and mistranslate one another,but we also recognize the urgent need to strive to understand and translateone another so that we can discover how we misunderstand and mistrans-late.

This also teaches us how modernity takes place in many sites in the world.Modernity is always relational in the sense that it cannot be confined to onerace, religion, tradition, or nation as it always happens as translation. Theidentities of race, tradition, and nation are constituted and discovered retro-spectively after the processes of translation. Translation allows you and meto share, but in order to share, we must translate and transform the originaland create something new. Sharing, therefore, is necessarily an experienceof creative work toward the other, of creative work in the means of com-munication. For this reason pidginization, a locale experience of creatinga pidgin from multiple languages, points to something fundamental aboutmodernity and its multiplicity. The nationalist demand for the archetypeof an unmixed and original language occurs equally as a reaction to and adenial of such an ongoing pidginization and multitude.

In this respect modernity is first a process in which people transcend dis-tances of many kinds in order to be in contact with one another. Let me notethat universality, not generality, is indissociably related to transcendence inthis sense. The misunderstanding of the nature of modernity stems fromthe misconception of the event of ‘‘being in contact with others.’’ This mis-understanding parallels a confusionism concerning translation and its rep-resentation.

Contact can never be construed as a one-way process of transmitting adoctrine or value from one party to another. Unless contact is a social rela-tion for which, in the final analysis, there can be no overarching transcen-dent viewpoint, even the transmission of a doctrine or commodity exchangecannot take place. Thus contact is capable of transforming both parties in-volved in the transaction. If a social process of transforming, distorting, or


destroying the way people are is called violence, modernity is indubitably aviolent event, to whose violence both parties are equally exposed (but notequally hurt by). Modernity is not a stasis, the state of some societies thatcan be specified by a set of characteristics. It is, rather, a kind of violenttransformative dynamic that arises from social encounters among hetero-geneous people. The notion of the subject that autonomously constitutesand transcends itself toward its future plays such an important role in theunderstanding of modern consciousness and in the history of the nationprecisely because modernity’s inescapable heteronomy is overlooked anderased in the essentially linear representation of this dynamics. Only underthe erasure of its inevitable engagement with alterity is history usurped bythe subject and turned into a development. A defeat or humiliating subjuga-tion of one party by another because of the other’s economic, technological,or military superiority is, without exception, an experience involving bothparties, however di&erently it may be lived through. Unless modernity ismistaken as development in various historicisms, unless it is thought to bea stage of evolution into which the society as a subject grows, it is simplyimpossible to rank various social formations in the chronological hierarchyof advancement and retardation.

What are mapped onto the chronology of maturity are consequencesof violent transformative dynamics: military conquests, religio-educationalcivilizing processes, economic competitions and rivalries, and politicalstruggles. There is no inherent reason why the prosperous should natu-rally be advanced on the evolutionary ladder, or the conquered necessarilyprimitive.

Yet in the emanation model of modernity, an economy prevails by whichthe West is assumed active in a&ecting social transformation in Asia, whileAsia always remains passive. This economy would then postulate two con-trasting but mutually supplementing presumptions: on one hand, the Westis capable of transforming itself on its own initiative from within whileremaining una&ected by the Rest of the World; on the other hand, Asiais incapable of transforming itself from within while being constantly af-fected by the West. Accordingly, what may be regarded as the content ofmodernity, such as ideas, institutions, and the ways of life particular tothe modern social formation, cannot be circulated other than in the one-way process of indoctrination. This is a vision of the civilizing mission thatfantastically satisfies the narcissistic wishes of those still arrested in the mis-

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sionary positionality, and—as I will discuss later with regard to the transfer-ential complicity based on culturalism between the United States and Japanafter World War II—such a vision respects the premises of culturalism andcovertly posits the unity of the West as a transhistorical entity like essential-ized national culture. The emanation model of modernity thus gives rise toAsian intellectuals’ obsessive concerns with their own version of modernityand their own modernization initiatives.

The global emergence of modernities has been accompanied by a drasti-cally increased frequency of social encounters and commodity exchanges allover the world. While social encounter and commodity exchange give riseto demands for transparency in communication and equivalence in value,they inevitably evoke the incommensurable in our sociality and the exces-sive in equation. Yet the incommensurable and the excessive cannot be ap-prehended outside the contexts of contact. For this reason we must not losesight of the fact that the particularistic insistence on the immutable ethnicand national cultures and traditions goes hand in hand with the universal-ism of historicism. The culturalist insistence on the integrity of an ethnicand national culture in Asia is always matched by a covert obsession withthe culturalist unity of the West. The rhetoric of Asian values, for example,is the simple reversal of Eurocentric culturalism.

Today it is increasingly di(cult to overlook the fact that the emanationmodel of modernity is both politically dubious and intellectually inade-quate. This prevailing view of the West is no longer acceptable, not only be-cause its material conditions are in the process of being undermined, butalso because we ought to refuse to view the relationships among many loca-tions in the world according to the cartographic imaginary of historicism.

Global modernity has accelerated cultural, economic, and political inter-change between di&erent regions and brought di&erent forms of power-knowledge into a more intense interaction.What once appeared exclusivelyEuropean no longer belongs to the Euro-American world, and there is anincreasing number of instances in which non-Euro-American loci are more‘‘Western’’ than some aspects of North American and European life. Thisdiversification of the West allows us to discover something fundamentally‘‘Asian’’ and ‘‘African’’ in those people who fashion themselves as ‘‘Western-ers’’ and to conceive of relations among people in many locations of theworld in an order other than the racialized hierarchy of the Eurocentricworldview. After all, is theWest one of the most e&ective and a&ective cultur-


alist imaginaries today? Racism being the institutionalized form of desire tonaturalize and dehistoricize social relations and identities, the mytheme ofthe West cannot be cleansed of its racist implications as long as culturalismis the most prevalent means of naturalizing and essentializing a person’ssocial status and a social group’s identity today.

Let me ask once more.Can we continue to presume that theWest is essen-tially a cartographic category? Can we continue to overlook the fact that thedistinction between the West and the Rest is increasingly independent ofgeography, race, ethnic culture, or nationality but is a matter of culturalcapital shaping the individual’s socioeconomic status? Can we continue toignore the wide diversity of contexts in which the very distinction betweenthe West and the Rest is opportunistically drawn, and the economic andsocial conditions that allow some people to a!ord to be ‘‘Western’’ while notallowing others?

By now it is self-evident, I hope, that the insistence on the propriety andnative authenticity of us Asians would only reinforce the discriminatory anddistinctive uniqueness of the West and prevent us from dismantling thecolonial relationship that underlies the identities of both the West and Asia.In this specific context the putative unity of the West, the dominant and uni-versalistic position, is sustained by the insistence on the equally putativeunity of Asia, the subordinate and particularistic position.

To illustrate this point, I will draw an example from the history of postwarJapan and refer to what many people in East and Southeast Asia called theJapanese War Responsibility Amnesia. Toward the end of the Asia PacificWar, the crucial issue with which Japanese leaders were primarily concernedin their negotiations with the Allied Powers about the conditions of Japan’ssurrender was neither the welfare of the population of the Japanese Em-pire nor the integrity of its territories but, instead the preservation of ‘‘thenational body.’’ In the language of the prewar Japanese state in the %!#$sand %!'$s, the national body (kokutai) was defined in terms of a combi-nation of private property rights and the emperor system. To violate thenational body, then, meant either socialist and communist activism that de-nied the unlimited validity of private property rights or the critique or refusalof the emperor as the national sovereign. In the late nineteenth century,when the emperor system was first installed, the national body was often

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referred to as a translation of nationality from British liberalism.5 Duringthe early years of the Meiji period (%)*)–%!%%), some intellectuals arguedthat the figure of the emperor represented the sense of nationality.Yet as theJapanese Empire expanded territorially, annexing Hokkaido, Okinawa, Tai-wan, Korea, the Pacific Islands, and finally large parts of East and SoutheastAsia under the umbrella of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,the emperor was increasingly associated with the universalistic principle ofthe Japanese reign under which people of di&erent ethnic backgrounds, ofdi&erent languages and cultures, and of di&erent residences were entitledto be integrated into the imperial nation and treated as equal subjects (theequality of which must be thoroughly scrutinized, indeed). Japan being animperial nation, the prewar emperor was rarely made to represent the unityof a particular ethnicity or national culture.

In the years subsequent to Japan’s defeat and the loss of the empire, thelegal status of the emperor underwent a drastic change. While the emperorwas defined as the sovereign of the Japanese state and the commander-in-chief of all the Japanese military forces under the Meiji Constitution, thenew constitution the U.S. government drafted and that its Occupation ad-ministration implemented in %!"+ defined the emperor as ‘‘the symbol ofthe unity of the Japanese nation.’’ The implementation of the new emperorsystem was accompanied by the culturalist discussions of Japanese nationalunity in Japan as well as in the United States. Thus after the loss of the em-pire, the emperor was made to symbolize the continuity of Japanese tradi-tion and the unity of Japanese national culture. Some conservative intellec-tuals, such as Watsuji Tetsur,, positively valued the new definition of theJapanese emperor and served as ideologues for the U.S. Occupation admin-istration and produced an argument that justified the new emperor systemon the basis of cultural nationalism.6 At the same time in the United States,anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict and Japan experts were involved inthe production of a similar culturalist argument about Japanese nationalcharacter during the war.7 After Japan’s defeat and under the Allied Powers’occupation administered by the United States, these two trends of cultur-alism reached a remarkably e&ective synthesis in the legitimization of thenew emperor system. The e&ects of such a culturalist endorsement of thenew emperor system are surprisingly lasting, and I do not think that eventoday, after more than a half century, the Japanese public and political elitehave freed themselves from the burdens of such a culturalist rhetoric.


As amply suggested in a recent article by Takashi Fujitani and in Edwin O.Reischauer’s September %!"# ‘‘Memorandum on Policy towards Japan,’’which Fujitani discovered at the National Archives, the Japanese nationaltradition and the unity of Japanese culture were clearly conceived of as in-struments for a U.S. occupation of Japan.8 As early as ten months after theJapanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Reischauer proposed to use the Sh,wa em-peror as a puppet for the U.S. Occupation administration after Japan’s sur-render. I would never claim that the memorandum prepared by Reischauer,who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of area studies in highereducation in the United States and who later became ambassador to Japan(%!*%–**), single-handedly laid the foundation for the postwar U.S. policiestoward Japan and East Asia. But his memorandum is extremely informativein depicting the overall design of postwar U.S. policies toward Japan, in-cluding the endorsement of ‘‘the national body.’’ In retrospect we realize notonly that Reischauer was consistent in his subsequent publications, such asJapan Past and Present (%!"+) and Wanted: An Asian Policy (%!--),9 but alsothat almost all of his proposals were implemented in U.S. policies towardJapan and East Asia after the war. This fact is most uncannily indicated bythe marker ‘‘@ Harvard University’’ at the end of the memorandum, as ifhe had intimated the historical destiny and political significance of Japa-nese studies at Harvard University in the U.S. domination of Japan. Thusthe memorandum played the eerie role of go-between in international poli-tics in later training and producing a future Japanese empress for the thirdgeneration of ‘‘the puppet.’’ 10

From the late %!"$s onward there gradually emerged a certain bilateralinternational complex of academic and journalistic activities and collectivefantasies that worked powerfully to justify and legitimate the postwar em-peror system along with U.S. policies toward Japan and East Asia.This bilat-eral international complex can be summarized as pertaining to a discursiveformation, and I would like to call it the discourse of the postwar emperorsystem. This discourse should encompass not merely governmental publi-cations and policies about the emperor and his family, academic justifica-tion and study of the emperor system, information generated by journal-ism, and images and fantastic scenarios produced by the cinema, radio andtelevision broadcasting, and mass print cultures, but also the practices ofdirect and indirect censorship in many di&erent contexts and levels of vari-ous media. Within this discourse the U.S. stance in the subjective position

804 Naoki Sakai

of ‘‘the West’’ and the Japanese stance in the subjective position of ‘‘Asia’’are clearly delineated. Yet while Japan represents Asia in this discourse, theviewpoints of people from other Asian countries—not only former Japanesecolonies such as Korea and Taiwan but also China and Southeast Asian coun-tries occupied by the Japanese troops—are entirely excluded. What HarryHarootunian once called ‘‘the bilateral narcissism of the United States andJapan’’ is clearly one of the regularities of this discourse.11 In its unity as a dis-cursive formation, it is neither American nor Japanese, since it is bilateral.Hence one can consider academic articles by Japanese conservative ideo-logues such as Watsuji Tetsur, and Ishii Ry,suke; the public policy memo-randa and journalistic publications by American ideologues and technocratssuch as Edwin O. Reischauer, John W. Hall, and Faubion Bowers; a greatnumber of films allegorically depicting the international relationships be-tween the United States and Japan and other regions of East Asia in genderterms; censorship imposed on the publishing industry, national press, andschool textbooks by the Occupation administration and the Japanese Min-istry of Education; and self-regulation voluntarily practiced by the Japanesemass media as all pertaining to the same discourse. Within the discourseof the postwar emperor system, which involved as actors and as speakersnot only the U.S. Occupation administration and Japanese nationalists andreactionaries but also the U.S. experts on Japanese studies, there are a fewimportant points that the design of the new emperor system clearly delin-eated.

First, Emperor Hirohito must be forgiven all his wartime responsibility,because otherwise he would be useless as a puppet leader of Japan to be ma-nipulated by the U.S. Occupation administration to rule Japan under U.S.hegemony. Reischauer claimed that Hirohito must be just like PuYi of Man-chukuo under the Japanese colonial rule. But, Hirohito had the potential tobe much more e&ective than Pu Yi as a puppet, since the mystification ofthe emperor had already been deliberately achieved by the prewar Japanesestate.12 In other words, hegemony was much more systematically and co-herently constructed for the e&ective performance of the puppet in Japanproper, in the late %!"$s and afterward, than in Manchukuo in the %!'$s.

Second, the Japanese people should not be deprived of their sense ofnational tradition and culture. As Watsuji argued consistently, they shouldachieve their cohesion as a nation in terms of the organic wholeness of theirnational culture and the continuity of its national history. This is where the


two schools of culturalism, the Japanese ethnic nationalists and the U.S.National Character Studies scholars, found common ground despite theirdiametrically opposed intents.The emperor’s political significance lay in hisaesthetic function of making Japanese people feel unified, in giving thema sense of togetherness without any concrete content. There was no needto define the emperor as an embodiment of the national will or to seekthe political function of the emperor in his ability to direct state policies.13

Hence he should be deprived of all legislative, administrative, and judicialauthority. The underlying axiom of this emperor system was tautological:that the Japanese should feel unified because they were Japanese and thatbecause they were born in Japan and brought up as Japanese, they shouldfeel destined to be Japanese.

Third, as Takashi Fujitani has asserted, U.S. policy makers had to takeracial problems into account as part of their ‘‘ideological warfare’’ in U.S.domestic as well as international politics during World War II.14 (It is impor-tant to note that many U.S. area specialists believed they had to continue tofight their ideological warfare well into the %!*$s.15) As a devoted patriot ofthe United States, Reischauer was afraid that the historically infamous treat-ment of U.S. residents of non-European ancestry, anti-Asian immigrationlegislation, and particularly the internment of residents of Japanese ances-try in concentration camps could well lend support to the Japanese cause inEast Asia.16 He thus confirmed the anxiety widely shared by the mainstreampopulation in the United States at the beginning of the Pacific War. AsGeorge Lipsitz illustrated, during World War II in the United States ‘‘racialsegregation in industry and in the army kept qualified fighters and factoryworkers from positions where they were sorely needed, while the racializednature of the war in Asia threatened to open up old wounds on the homefront.’’ 17 So Reischauer argued, the ‘‘point I wish to make has to do withthe inter-racial aspects of the conflict in Asia. Japan is attempting to makeher war against the United Nations into a holy crusade of the yellow andbrown peoples for freedom from the white race.’’ 18 The Japanese attack onWhite-Americanism and white supremacy could well invoke universal sym-pathy with the Japanese justification of their policies in Asia and the Pacific.Therefore he concluded that the United States must appear universalisticand open to all races in order to win the ideological war against Japan. Here itis worth keeping in mind that, almost simultaneously, the ideologues of theJapanese Empire put forth exactly the same argument for racial and ethnic

806 Naoki Sakai

equality among the peoples under Japanese colonial rule. Here, too, let menote the truism that imperialism without universalism is a contradiction.Toemphasize the empire’s commitment to the universalistic and multiethnicprinciple, the Japanese government’s condemnation of racist policies, and‘‘the integration of ethnic groups according to the Imperial Way,’’ 19 the ideo-logues of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere repeatedly issued andrecited old statements and idioms, such as ‘‘Emperor’s equal mercy to everysubject without the slightest discrimination among di&erent ethnic groupswithin the Empire’’;20 and ‘‘Every person who wishes to reside on a perma-nent basis in the territory of this new nation is equal and should be able toenjoy rights to be treated as equal, regardless of whether he be of the Han,Manchu, Mongolian, Japanese, Korean or any other ethnicity.’’ 21 A numberof publications, such as Shinmei Masamichi’s Race and Society and K,sakaMasaaki’s Philosophy of Ethnicity, o&ered systematic philosophical and socialscientific critiques of racism and ethnic nationalism as part of the state’s‘‘ideological warfare’’ (shis"-sen) against Anglo-American colonialism, Com-munism and ethnic particularism.22 (It is significant that Watsuji Tetsur,,who repeatedly made racist statements against the Jews and the Chinese,despite the Japanese state policies against overt racism from the late %!#$suntil the defeat, produced the most lasting cultural nationalist justificationof the U.S. policy concerning the new emperor system.) 23 Yet it is obviousthat the critique of racism was called for due to a number of political ne-cessities: the Japanese government and military had to compete with theU.S., British, French, and other old colonial powers for popularity amongpeoples in Asia and therefore had to appeal to the Asian peoples’ hatred ofEuro-American racism, and because of the shortage of labor for industry andincreasing casualties in the military, a large number of young people had tobe recruited and drafted from the colonized population in Korea and Taiwanto serve in the Japanese military and industry. It is important to rememberthat, just as U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was afraid of imaginedblack rebellions to be instigated by the Japanese and the Communists, Japa-nese leaders, too, were haunted by an anxiety over possible mutinies by thecolonized.24

As Reischauer’s patriotism was genuine in its careful consideration ofhow U.S. racism would look to Asian eyes, the unequivocally racist aspectof U.S. nationalism was all the more manifest in his overtures about thestrategic need to disavow racism in the United States. Of course, it does not


mean that either Reischauer or his Japanese counterparts were primarilyconcerned with the abolition of racial discrimination within their respec-tive empires. What they clearly shared was a recognition that the govern-mental acceptance of racism and ethnic nationalism was absolutely counter-productive to the management of their empires and ideological warfares.They insisted, therefore, that their policies had to be cloaked with the auraof universalism, regardless of how unreal or contradictory such universal-ism may have been in concrete historical situations. It must also be noted,however, that the antiracist rhetoric as such could eventually result in theremoval of certain racist legislation. Even Reischauer’s antiracist rhetoriccannot be treated merely as a case of false consciousness.

Fourth, the installment of the new emperor system actually marked theend of the antiracism argument in Japan. The Occupation administrationdeliberately censored not racist but antiracist utterances and publications inpostwar Japan, since the denunciation of Anglo-American imperialism andDutch colonialism almost always premised the general critique of white su-premacy during the war. It goes without saying that such an oppression ofthe critique of racism was also a very convenient measure for the Japanesegovernment, which had to discard the population of its former colonies andthe minority population inside Japan proper, such as the resident Koreansand Taiwanese.25 The majority of the newly redefined Japanese nation didnot object to the censorship of the critique of racism either, because as theatrocities committed by the Japanese during the war were very often racistin nature, the censorship could in fact help them overlook their own colo-nial guilt and war responsibility. Instead an international division of laborwas established between the United States and Japan, according to whichthe United States continued to be in charge of uniting various ethnic andracial groups under the banner of universalism, while the Japanese gave upan active role in such integration. In other words, the Japanese were sup-posed to be content with their naturalized status, passively internalizing thedescription given by the outside observers, whereas the Americans wouldseek to transcend and transform the racial and ethnic particularities so asto create a new subjectivity within the premises of their nationalism.

The Meiji Constitution unambiguously defined the emperor as thesupreme commander of the Japanese military forces, and in his name thewar in Pacific Asia was fought and many atrocities were committed. To re-define the status of the emperor as the symbol of the unity of the Japanese

808 Naoki Sakai

nation and its culture while overlooking his war responsibility was to re-lieve the Japanese nation of its war responsibility, as many analysts have al-ready noted. Under the Meiji Constitution all soldiers and bureaucrats weresupposed to act under the command of their superiors, and their superi-ors would surely claim they acted under the command of their superiors,and every important policy including the declaration of war was legislatedand implemented as an order of their commander-in-chief, the emperor.When the emperor was pardoned, how could one possibly prosecute hissubjects, who at least in theory, followed his command even in their bru-tality and inhumane acts? What the U.S. Occupation administration soughtinstead was a few scapegoats, such as T,j, Hideki and a very small num-ber of militarists,26 and no doubt Japanese conservatives and many wartimeleaders wholeheartedly welcomed such a decision. From the viewpoint ofthe Occupation administration, the International Military Tribunal for theFar East (the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) was held as a public procedure oflegitimization to o(cially exempt the emperor and the overwhelming ma-jority of the Japanese from further investigation into their war responsibility.The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was a complete failure in its historical sig-nificance because the prosecutors would not deal with the racist and sexistatrocities committed under colonial and imperialist policies in East Asia. Inshort, they did not pursue the possibilities inherent in the idea of crimesagainst humanity for fear that the accusation of the Japanese leadership fortheir crimes against humanity could easily boomerang to the Allied Powers,particularly to the United States.

Fifty years later such a political settlement has produced a situationwhere, contrary to what Takeuchi Yoshimi felt, an increasing number of theJapanese are shameless about Japanese imperialist maneuvers in Asia in the%!'$s and early %!"$s,27 while they are somnolently happy with the newU.S. strategic arrangement in East Asia, except when they are occasionallyprodded by incidents such as the mention of the comfort women or theEnglish publication about the rape of Nanjing. It is true that a more overtanti-American rhetoric flourishes in Japan today, but those populist nation-alists, not to mention those self-claimed realist nationalists who boast oftheir technocratic rationality,28 can never take issue with the postwar U.S.Occupation policies that dispensed the Japanese from their war responsi-bility and colonial guilt.

The preservation of national history and of the putative unity of national


culture was thus an exceedingly e&ective means of keeping the occupiedpopulation, first, under direct American rule and then indirectly complicitwith U.S. hegemony. The most ironic and interesting aspect of the postwarrelationship between the United States and Japan can perhaps be found inthe fact that the United States e&ectively continued to dominate Japan byendowing the Japanese with the sense of Japanese tradition and the groundsfor their nationalism. It is through the apparent sense of national unique-ness and cultural distinctiveness that people in Japan were subordinated toU.S. hegemony in East Asia.

Some sentimental reactionaries such as Et, Jun have argued that theOccupation administration deprived the Japanese people of their right tonarrate their own national history. But this was an embarrassingly naive andconceited complaint. Such rhetoric only serves as an international sort of co-quetry whose sexist aspect I cannot overemphasize, of amae in the attitudeof which, with the gesture of self-pity, the weak (Japan) solicits the attentionof the strong (the United States).

Contrary to Et,’s assessment, the U.S. Occupation administration inten-tionally allowed the Japanese to maintain their sense of cultural and histori-cal continuity; it helped nurture the desire of the Japanese to narrate theirown self-serving story/history.What seems to be a fatal deficiency of Et, andsentimental nationalists like him is an anachronistic assumption that un-critically takes the ideals of the nineteenth-century European nation-statefor granted, namely that a nationalism seeking a nation’s autonomy is ex-ternal to the imperialism dominating the a&airs of that nation. According tothe cartographic imagination, U.S. imperial nationalism is external to Japa-nese nationalism. So from the outset Et, put aside the logical possibilitythat U.S. imperial nationalism and Japanese nationalism could be compos-sible and internal to one another; he dared not examine the logical possibilitythat Japanese nationalism itself could accommodate U.S. imperial national-ism, or even be an organ thereof.What must be called into question is the as-sumption of externality between an imperial nationalism and a nationalism.Already in the %!'$s did not some ideologues for the East Asian Commu-nity—which was later called the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere—advocate the Japanese policies of embracing Chinese nationalism as a nec-essary component of Japan’s transnational hegemony? 29 They desperatelysought ways to construct a Japanese transnational hegemony that was alsoanticolonial. In this respect the ideological maneuvers adopted by the U.S.

810 Naoki Sakai

Occupation administration in Japan should not be particularly innovative orsurprising.30

Even today, Japanese nationalists are incapable of confronting the com-plicity between their nationalism and U.S. hegemony. As long as the Japa-nese were allowed to secure the sense of national cohesion in their culturaltradition and the organic unity of their culture, they would never be able toengage in serious negotiation with people in East and Southeast Asia whowere directly victimized by or are related to the victims of Japanese imperialnationalism. They may well be generous and forgiving to individual Japa-nese nationals but would never forget the past deeds of Japanese imperialnationalism. ‘‘They may forgive but never forget.’’

Despite such a complicity between the Japanese nationalism that has in-sisted on its particularistic exclusionism and the U.S. imperial national-ism that has tried to appear universalistic since Japan’s defeat, however,the distinction between the West and Asia has been rigorously maintainedthroughout the postwar period in Japanese cultural nationalism as well asthe U.S. area studies on Japan. Furthermore, the rhetoric of Japanese cultur-alism has been obsessed predominantly with the image of Japanese distinc-tiveness, but such a rhetoric was produced only in contrast to some fantasticimage of Western culture against the background of the cartographic imagi-nary of the globe. The Japanese cultural identity was produced with a viewto some imaginary observer who is positioned outside the organic whole ofthe Japanese nation. And this imaginary observer is habitually referred toas the West, often symbolizing U.S. hegemony.

I do not think that the assessment I present here is limited to the case ofJapan after its defeat. This is just one instance in which the sense of ethnicand national identity is invoked against the background of the culturalistbinary schema of the West and the Rest. It might appear strange that theUnited States and Japan, the largest and second largest national economiesof the world and two prominent imperial nations, still recognize each otherin such a colonialist manner. But this instance only shows how powerful thediscourse of the West and the Rest still is.

Given the aforementioned understanding of the West and its discrimina-tory constitution, how can we possibly address ourselves as Asians? The finalquestion I would like to ask, then, is, How can we possibly prevent our self-


referential address, we Asians, from being caught in this binarism or fromreproducing something like Japanese culturalism? I cannot dare to say I amable to o&er a solution. My response is a proposal at best, and it is brief, atthe risk of oversimplification.

First, let me issue a warning disclaimer that neither the West nor Asia isa mere illusion that one can dispel by adjusting one’s mental attitude. Theyare social realities even if they are of an imaginary kind. However, if thedistinction between the West and Asia is increasingly independent of geog-raphy, race, ethnic culture, or nationality but is a matter of cultural capitalshaping the individual’s socioeconomic status, one can be attentive to thesocioeconomic formation of the qualifications in terms of which the Westand Asia are distinctively and performatively presented and to how peopleinvest in the acquisition of such qualifications. In this respect, the West isa sort of ‘‘fictive ethnicity,’’ to use the terminology of Etienne Balibar.31 Insome social contexts, an increasing number of people fail to qualify eitheras Westerners or as Asians. We come across more and more instances thatmay appear to be oxymorons: a Chinese with superb taste in classical Euro-pean music; a black American with upper-middle-class mannerisms; a poorwhite American whose faith is utterly incompatible with the secularizedsense of ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘Western’’ religiosity—a typical case of what sociolo-gists call the American anomaly; an Indonesian preoccupied with Christianethics; a white French male who is superhumanly meticulous and patientwith his handwork in the fine details of his craftsmanship but who is abso-lutely hopeless in mathematical reasoning; and so forth. When examinedcarefully, none of these instances shows that there is an inherent quality thatdetermines a person either as a Westerner or as an Asian.What makes suchan instance appear as a cultural or civilizational oxymoron, and potentiallyas an excuse for social discrimination, is our prejudice, our predeterminedjudgment. It is our prescribed investment for a certain distinction, for a jus-tification for exclusion, and for our own identity. It is probably impossibleto rid ourselves of those prejudices altogether in one clean sweep. Yet wemay be able to invent a number of strategies whereby to avoid reproducingsuch a discriminatory gesture as that of the exclusionary constitution of theWest. For at any cost, we have to avoid shaping Asia in a mirror image of theWest at its worst.

Instead of naturalizing the category of the Asian, of grounding Asian iden-tity on some presumably immutable properties of a person or a group, we

812 Naoki Sakai

should treat it as a consequence of constantly changing socioeconomic con-ditions.We should call a person Asian whenever we find some e&ect of socialadversity or a trait of barbarism from the alleged ideal image of a Westernerin that person, regardless of his or her physiognomy, linguistic heritage,claimed ethnicity, or habitual characteristics.We should use the word Asianin such a way as to emphasize the fluidity of the very distinction betweenthe West and Asia rather than its persistence.

Even though we would face an outright rejection in the action by thosewho fail to qualify as, but adamantly insist upon natively being,Westerners,we should seek occasions to call those who customarily fashion themselvesas Westerners you Asians. Asians must be a vocative for invitation. Asiansare new barbarians. It is in order to break through the putative exclusive-ness of our cultural, civilizational, and racial identity that we must addressourselves to others by saying you Asians. As long as you are barbaric in onemeasure or another, you are fully qualified to be an Asian.

Notes

% Takeuchi Yoshimi, ‘‘Ch.goku no kindai to nihon no kindai’’ [Chinese modernity and Japa-nese modernity] (%!"+), in Nihon to Ajia [Japan and Asia] (Tokyo, %!!'), %%–-+ (also pub-lished with a di&erent title, ‘‘Kindai toha nanika’’ [What is modernity?] in %!")). For adiscussion on universalism and particularism in modernity, see Naoki Sakai, ‘‘Critiqueof Modernity: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly)+.' (%!))): "+-–-$", or its Japanese translation in Gendai Shis" %-.%- (%!)+): %)"–##$.

# Maruyama Masao, Nihonseiji shis"-shi kenky# [Intellectual history of Tokugawa Japan],trans. Mikiso Hane (Princeton, %!+"). This book consists of three essays, the first two ofwhich were written earlier during the Asia Pacific War. The last essay, which di&ers muchfrom the previous two in its orientation, was published in %!""when it was almost certainthat Japan was going to be defeated. Also important as a contemporary work of historiog-raphy based on the concept of negativity is Ienaga Sabur,’s ‘‘Nihon shis,-shi niokeru hiteino ronri no hattatsu’’ [The development of the logic of negativity in Japanese intellectualhistory] (%!'+–')), in Ienaga Sabur" Shu (Tokyo, %!!+), %:'–+). The concept of negativityplayed a central role in both Maruyama’s studies of Tokugawa intellectual history andIenaga’s studies of Japanese Buddhism. Initially it was elaborated on in Tanabe Hajime’ssocial ontology in the early %!'$s. However, unlike Takeuchi’s, neither Maruyama’s norIenaga’s negativity implied ‘‘the defeat’’ or ‘‘being colonized.’’

' For an elaborate critique of historicism, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe(Princeton, #$$$).

" On the Wittgensteinian problematic of naming, see Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity(Cambridge, MA, %!)#).


- See Fukuzawa Yukichi, Bunmeiron no Gairyaku [An outline of the theory of civilization](%)+-; Tokyo, %!'+), '+. There is an English translation, but the translator does not seemaware of Fukuzawa’s reference to John Stuart Mill there.

* See Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity (Minneapolis, %!!+), chap. ', ‘‘Return to theWest/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsur,’s Anthropology and Discussions of Authen-ticity,’’ and chap. ", ‘‘Subject and/or Shutai and the Inscription of Cultural Di&erence.’’

+ As many have already pointed out, culturalism was also the most prominent feature of theU.S. e&orts during the war to characterize the Japanese nation, the most famous of whichis Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (%!"*; Boston, %!)!). A monumen-tal critique of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword can be found in C. Douglas Lummis, ANew Look at ‘‘The Chrysanthemum and the Sword’’ (Tokyo, %!)#), in which Lummis pointsout the close relationship between the repressed anxiety about the genocidal foundationof the United States underlying Benedict’s work and her patriotic devotion to Americannationalism.

) Takashi Fujitani, ‘‘Reischauer no kairai tenn,-sei k,s, [Reischauer’s design of a puppetemperor system],’’ in Sekai (March #$$$): %'+–"*; Edwin O. Reischauer, ‘‘Memorandumon policy towards Japan,’’ September %", %!"#, with materials collected by War Depart-ment General Sta&, Organization and Training Division, G-', concerning ‘‘Enlistmentof loyal American citizens of Japanese descent into the Army and Navy,’’ December %+,%!"#, #!%.#, Army-AG Classified Decimal File %!"$–"#, Records of the Adjunct General’sO(ce, %!%+– , Record Group "$+, entry '*$, box %"+, National Archives, College Park,MD. For the entire memorandum, please refer to the March issue of Sekai at the Iwanamiweb site, http://www.iwanami.co.jp/sekai/.

! Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan Past and Present (NewYork, %!"+) and Wanted: An Asian Policy(New York, %!--).

%$ Princess Masako received her postgraduate education at Harvard prior to her engagementto Crown Prince Naruhito. In total, the area studies program on Japan at Harvard hadprobably received the largest donation from Japan among all universities in the UnitedStates prior to Masako’s marriage into the Japanese imperial family. Since her marriage,Harvard University has continued to receive large donations from the Japanese govern-ment and its subsidiary organizations. Such a mutually dependent relationship betweenthe postwar Japanese emperor system and Japanese studies clearly marks those particularpolitical and economic conditions under which the studies of Japan have been developedin Japan and the United States. This insight should imply that a di&erent kind of Japa-nese studies should be developed in countries such as China, Australia, Malaysia,Canada,Indonesia, India, France, England, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea,Taiwan,Germany, Rus-sia, Poland, Turkey, New Zealand, Mexico, Italy, and so forth. In adopting the accomplish-ments of U.S. Japanology and Japanese Nihonshi and Nihon-bungaku, one must be acutelyaware of the ideological and political limitations within which Japanese studies have beendeveloped in the United States and Japan.

%% See Takashi Fujitani, Ry.ichi Narita, and Naoki Sakai, ‘‘America’s ‘Japan’/Voices of Amer-ica,’’ Gendai Shis" #'.#' (%!!-): )–'+; Harry D. Harootunian and Naoki Sakai, ‘‘Nihonkennky# to bunka kenky#’’ [Japanese studies and cultural studies], Shis", no. )++ (%!!+):

814 Naoki Sakai

"–-' (English translation: ‘‘Japan Studies and Cultural Studies,’’ in positions +.# [%!!!]:-!'–*"+).

%# In his ‘‘Memorandum,’’ Reischauer argued,

In Germany and Italy we can expect to see a natural revulsion against Nazi andFascist rule, a revulsion so strong that it will carry a large percentage of the popu-lation over to a policy of cooperation with the United Nations. In Japan, on thecontrary, no such easy road to post-war victory is possible. There we shall have towin our ideological battles by carefully planned strategy. A first step would natu-rally be to win over to our side a group willing to cooperate. Such a group, if itrepresented the minority of the Japanese people, would be in a sense a puppetregime. Japan has used the strategem of puppet governments extensively but withno great success because of the inadequacy of the puppets. But Japan itself has cre-ated the best possible puppet for our purposes, a puppet who not only could be wonover to our side but who would carry with him a tremendous weight of authority,which Japan’s puppets in China have always lacked. I mean, of course, the JapaneseEmperor.

%' See Watsuji Tetsur,, ‘‘Kokutai henk"-ron ni tsuite, Sasaki Hakushi no oshite wo kou’’ [Re-questing advice from Dr. Sasaki on his argument that the concept of the national bodymust be changed] (March %!"+), in ‘‘Kokukimin t"g" no sh"ch"’’ [The symbol of nationalunity], in Watsuji Tetsur" Zensh# (Tokyo, %!*#), %":'%'–!*.

%" Takashi Fujitani, ‘‘Reischauer no kairai tenn,-sei k,s,,’’ %"'.%- Reischauer’s Wanted: An Asian Policy is an early example. You may also find a number of

typically jingoistic declarations in Robert N. Bellah, ‘‘Values and Social Changes in Mod-ern Japan,’’ Asian Cultural Studies, no. ' (%!*#): %'–-*. Of course, the war in which theywere so patriotically involved was no longer the Pacific War, but it was called the Cold Warin the meantime.

%* As to Japan’s ideological goal in Pacific Asia, Reischauer continued, ‘‘China’s courageousstand has prevented Japan from exploiting this type of propaganda too much, but it hasapparently met with a certain degree of success in Siam and the colonial lands of south-eastern Asia and even in a few circles in China. If China were to be forced out of the war,the Japanese might be able to transform the struggle in Asia in reality into a full-scaleracial war’’ (Reischauer, ‘‘Memorandum’’).

%+ George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia, %!!)), %!'. ‘‘Mostimportant, asking African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and NativeAmerican soldiers to fight for freedoms overseas that they did not themselves enjoy athome presented powerful political, ideological, and logistical problems’’ (ibid.). Reis-chauer’s reference to ‘‘the inter-racial aspects of the conflict in Asia’’ clearly shows his andmost white policy makers’ paranoia about the possibility of what Lipsitz described as ‘‘atransnational alliance among people of color,’’ which could bring ‘‘to the surface the ines-capably racist realities behind the seemingly color-blind national narrative of the UnitedStates and its aims in the war. . . . Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson attributed black de-mands for equality during the conflict to agitation by Japanese agents and Communists’’(Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, %)+, %!').


%) Reischauer continued: ‘‘The best proof of the falsity of Japanese claims is America’s recordboth in the Philippines and in China. However, on the other side, we have also unwit-tingly contributed to Japan’s dangerous propaganda campaign.The removal from theWestCoast of the American citizen of Japanese ancestry along with the Japanese aliens was nodoubt a move made necessary by immediate military considerations, but it provided theJapanese with a powerful argument in their attempt to win the Asiatic peoples to the viewthat the white race is not prepared to recognize them as equals and even now continuesto discriminate against them’’ (Reischauer, ‘‘Memorandum’’).

%! Murayam Michio, Dait" a kensetsuron [Construction of greater East Asia] (Tokyo, %!"').#$ Rescript to the population of Korea, %!%+.#% The Manchukuo Declaration of Independence, %!'#.## Shinmei Masamichi, Jinshu to shakai (Tokyo, %!"$); K,saka Masaaki, Minzoku no tetsugaku

(Tokyo, %!"#).#' During the war Watsuji continued to adhere to the ideal of pure blood and opposed the

multiethnic principle of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere by taking a stancethat was similar to that of Nazism. See Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, chap. ". Alsointeresting is the fact that Watsuji was often celebrated as the representative thinkerof Japanese thought in Japanese studies in the United States and Western Europe. It isinteresting that those in the missionary positionality deliberately overlooked the Japa-nese thinkers who were engaged in the construction of universalistic ideology duringthe war, such as Tanabe Hajime, Ienaga Sabur,, Miki Kiyoshi, and K,saka Masaaki, andcelebrated particularistic thinkers like Watsuji as typical of Japanese culture. Compareto Robert Bellah, ‘‘Japan’s Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of WatsujiTetsur,,’’ Journal of Asian Studies #"." (%!*-): -+'–!"; Augustin Berque, Vivre l’espaceau Japon (Paris, %!)#) and Le Sauvage et L’Artifice: Les Japonais devant la Nature (Paris,%!)*).

#" Starting with the Independence Movement of %!%! and the genocide of the Koreanresidents in Tokyo in the aftermath of the earthquake in %!#', the Japanese leadershipwas preoccupied with a possible mutiny of the colonized. As indicated by the recentannouncement by Ishihara Shintar,, governor of Tokyo, made for the occasion of theseventy-seventh anniversary of the %!#' earthquake, the majority of the Japanese are stillanxious about the possible mutiny by the foreign and the former colonial residents inJapan. We must not forget that to integrate the Koreans into the Japanese military for thewar in Asia and the Pacific meant giving arms to them. Recall what happened in the U.S.military in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and one will understand how anxious theJapanese leadership had to be. In due course the Japanese army had to carefully allocatesoldiers from Korea, from the level of the division down to that of the company, in sucha way that the Korean soldiers would never constitute the majority. See Higuchi Y.ichi,K"gun heishi ni sareta ch"senjin [Koreans who were made emperor’s soldiers] (Tokyo, %!!%),)!–!'.

#- Edwin Reischauer was also involved in the postwar treatment of Korean residents inJapan. Here, too, his racist attitude not only toward Asians in general but particularlytoward the Koreans was manifest. See Reischauer’s foreword to Edward G. Wagner’s TheKorean Minority in Japan, $%&'–$%(& (New York, %!-%).

816 Naoki Sakai

#* According to Reichauer, ‘‘Memorandum,’’

The possible role of the Japanese Emperor in the post-war rehabilitation of the Japa-nese mentality has definite bearing upon the present situation.To keep the Emperoravailable as a valuable ally or puppet in the post-war ideological battle we must keephim unsullied by the present war. In other words, we cannot allow him to be por-trayed to the American people as the counterpart of Hitler and Mussolini in Asia oras the personification of the Japanese brand of totalitarianism. General reviling ofthe Emperor by our press or radio can easily ruin his utility to us in the post-warworld. It would make the American people unprepared to cooperate with him oreven to accept him as a tool. And naturally it would make the Emperor himself andthe men who surround him less ready to cooperate with our government. Duringthe past several months there has been considerable use of the name Hirohito as asymbol of the evil Japanese system. With the post-war problem in mind, it would behighly advisable for the government to induce the news-disseminating organs of thiscountry to avoid reference to the Emperor as far as possible and to use individuals,such as T,j, or Yamamoto or even a mythical toothsome Mr. Motto (in uniform!) aspersonifications of the Japan we are fighting.

#+ For the problem of shamelessness and of guilt, see Ukai Satoshi, ‘‘The Future of an A&ect:The Historicity of Shame’’ in Traces, no. % (#$$%): '–'*.

#) It is interesting that the Obuchi cabinet’s e&ort to produce a new vision of twenty-first-century Japan is still very much based on the old premises of the Watsuji-style culturalnationalism. See Report: The Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the Twenty-first Century (Tokyo, #$$$). The commission is headed by well-known Nihon Bunka-ronja(Japanese culturalist) Kawai Hayao, who is also director-general of the International Re-search Center for Japanese Studies, a governmental research institute with strong con-nections with Watsuji. Also see Harry D. Harootunian’s analysis of the Policy ResearchBureaus of the Ohira Cabinet, ‘‘Visible Discourse/Invisible Ideologies,’’ in Postmodernismand Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, NC, %!)!), *'–!#.

#! A number of thinkers can be mentioned in this respect. I will, however, limit my scopeto two prominent imperial nationalists, Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime, both of whomapproved of Chinese nationalism and tried to integrate it into a new transnational arrange-ment. Under the overwhelming influence of Martin Heidegger, with whom both studiedin Germany in the %!#$s,Tanabe and Miki worked on the theoretical design of subjectivitythat is not based on the nineteenth-century model of sovereignty for the nation-state.

Tanabe introduced his version of Hegelianism with heavy Christian overtones into thecritique of Linnean classificatory logic and tried to establish a new way of classifying socialgroups and individuals. His philosophical argument was often appealed to by his fol-lowers as the philosophical ground for the multiethnic East Asian Community. Compareto Naoki Sakai, ‘‘Ethnicity and Species: On the Philosophy of the Multi-ethnic State inJapanese Imperialism,’’ Radical Philosophy, no. !- (%!!!): ''–"-.

As the leading figure in intellectual journalism who was sympathetic to Marxism inthe late %!#$s and %!'$s, Miki Kiyoshi was also involved in the design of the Greater East


Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. He helped organize the governmental research group Sh,waKenky.-kai (Sh,wa Research Association) and wrote a number of proposals about how tocreate a system beyond the rigid opposition of socialism and capitalism. He saw Japaneseexpansionism in China in the light of an uncontrollable capitalism and sought to curb itsinevitable violence.

'$ Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, MA, #$$$), is suggestive in manyrespects. Perhaps the authors are so much concerned with the transatlantic di&erence be-tween the anti-imperialist empire of North America and the old imperialisms of WesternEurope that they attribute too much American uniqueness to the empire of the twentiethcentury. The deployment in the %!'$s and %!"$s of an imperial nationalism in East Asiamust be understood as an important moment in the historical transition from the imperi-alisms of Western Europe to the empire of North America. The idiom ‘‘unlike Europeancolonialism and imperialism’’ was so frequently repeated in Japanese documents and pro-paganda whenever the innovative nature of Japanese rule in East Asia was discussed inthe %!'$s and early %!"$s, and their claim of anticolonialism was undoubtedly an integralpart of their notion of the East Asian Community (which was later called the Greater EastAsian Co-Prosperity Sphere).The reality of their rule evidently betrayed their anticolonialclaim in many places and on many occasions, but clearly the Japanese leadership, par-ticularly the members who were called Shin Kanryo (new bureaucrats) and the a(liatedintellectuals, were seeking a new transregional formation in East Asia that the project ofManchukuo typically exemplified. In this sense Japanese imperial nationalism shared alot with the American empire. As goes without saying, it is utterly impossible to concludethat Japanese and U.S. imperial nationalisms were less violent or brutal than Europeanimperialisms. Yet, the Japanese and American rhetoric of anticolonialism seems to indi-cate a di&erent type or configuration of transregional hegemony.

'% See Etienne Balibar, ‘‘The Nation Form,’’ in Etienne Balibar and Emmanuel Wallerstein,Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, (London and New York, %!!%).