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  • Möbius StripInstances of Cultural Translation between China, Japan, and the "West"
  • Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (bio)
Japan's Love-Hate Relationship with the West. By Sukehiro Hirakawa. Folkestone: Global Oriental Ltd., 2005. 557 pages. Hardcover £55.00.
Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature. By Atsuko Sakaki. University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. 269 pages. Hardcover $62.00.
Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity. By Dennis Washburn. Columbia University Press, 2006. 303 pages. Hardcover $40.00.

There once was a time when we talked about the world in simpler terms. Japan was situated at the far end of the Eurasian continent, closed off, more or less tightly, from the rest of the world for almost two and a half centuries, until it was "opened" by "Western" powers. After this "rude awakening," the country tried hard to absorb "Western" knowledge, it "received" "influences" in order to "catch up and overtake" (oitsuke, oikose) until it was on a par with the most advanced nations of the northern hemisphere.

During the past decades, however, we have learned to see and describe things in a more complex fashion. Many of the notions that we used to employ in a holistic mode have now begun to 'stare back" at us, and when we look at the process of cultural learning that took place in Japan in the mid-nineteenth through the twentieth centuries or before, the once familiar images of a one-way traffic between a larger and more powerful unit ("China," "continental culture," or "the West") and a passively receptive smaller entity named Japan no longer suffice. What has taken their place are more differentiated and less clear-cut models of explanation, ones that do away with units such as "national culture" and a notion of normative modernity of Western origin, models that question the familiar oppositions and conceptual distinctions between "us" and "them." Scholarly interest in the fields of literature, linguistics, anthropology, regional [End Page 347] studies, and history has come to focus on processes of transcultural learning and "translation" as interactions implying asymmetrical power relations in the context of identity formation as observed in (mostly) literary texts. It is in the context of these issues that I want to discuss three recent publications that deal with such interactions and that allow us to relate research on Japan to overall developments in this thriving area of intellectual inquiry.

As a collection of essays and papers produced over more than three decades as part of what is introduced as the author's lifelong project, the first book under discussion differs somewhat from the other two. Hirakawa Sukehiro, "doyen of intercultural relations," as the book's back flap has it, sets out to "bridge some of the gaps, breaking linguistic and cultural barriers" between what he sees as a major divide among not only the general public, but also academics of Japan and the Anglophone world. Hirakawa, professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, his academic base for half a century, regards research into Japan's intercultural relations with the Western world as his long-term theme. To this end, as he points out in his preface, he has adopted a "bi-cultural approach" and taken as his "latent leitmotif" the explanation of "Japanese intellectuals" ambivalence vis-à-vis the West" (p. xi). The book consists of twenty-nine chapters arranged in six parts following a roughly chronological order, from "Japan's Love-Hate Relationship with China" and "Japan's Turn to the West" through "Return to the East," "From War to Peace," "Attempt at Cross-Cultural Elucidation," and "Japanese Writers between East and West." What now form the chapters are, as a matter of fact, pieces of a highly diverse nature. The majority are conference papers, lectures, and occasional essays, including a piece for the popular journal Shokun! (chapter 5-1 on comparative work ethics), dating from as early as 1969 (chapter 3-3 on "The Yellow Peril and the White Peril: The Views of Anatole France") through 2003 (chapter 1-3 on "The Awakening of Asia"). Part 2 ("Japan's Turn to the West") consists mainly of the author's contributions to volume 5 of the...

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