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ELEVEN The Complicity of Aesthetics Karatani Kōjin Karatani Kōjin (b. 1941) has established himself as one of the leading literary critics of contemporary Japan and has mastered a good deal of respect in the West as well, where two of his numerous books have recently been translated.1 A professor at Kinki University, Karatani is the chief editor of Critical Space (Hihyō Kūkan)—probably the first Japanese journal to seriously engage Western scholarship on issues of Japanese culture. Karatani has written extensively on the complicity of Western hermeneutic strategies in constructing what we today call “Japan.” In his opinion , aesthetics played a distinctive role in developing a major paradox in the evaluation of the Japanese arts. His argument goes as follows: The traditionalist school led by Okakura Kakuzō, which privileged native paintings and sculptures over the imported arts from the West, was actually the most modern and the most oriented to the West. After all, the originator of the movement was a scholar from Salem, Massachusetts, Ernest Fenollosa , who heavily relied on Hegelian and Spencerian philosophies.2 Karatani reminds us that the traditional arts of Japan were “discovered” by Westerners who were discontented with the modernity of their own culture and therefore searched in Japan for ways to overcome modernity. Japan came to be discovered by the West through its art—particularly the ukiyo-e of the Edo period, which exercised a considerable influence on French impressionist painters. Vincent van Gogh’s oft-repeated wish of wanting “to see things like a Japanese,” indicates that “Japan” came to the West as a fiction in the images that were produced within the aesthetic 263 1. See Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), and Karatani Kōjin, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 2. “‘The traditionalist faction’ that propelled with passion the cause of the art school and the museum was the most vocal faction propounding modernism and westernization.” See Karatani Kōjin, “Bijutsukan to Shite no Nihon: Okakura Tenshin to Fenorosa,” Hihyō Kūkan 2(1) (1994):60. I recapitulate the remainder of the essay in the following paragraph. realm. The Western market was ready to accept works of art that presented “Japan” in its most aestheticized manner—an argument that can easily be applied to literature as well when one considers that the most popular Japanese writers in the West (Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Kawabata Yasunari, and Mishima Yukio) share in the production of an aestheticized Japan. Art in Japan became “modern” when in the West the same genre was held in suspicion of modernity. This happened to literature as well, a field whose importation from the West coincided with its Western critique.3 Karatani argues that if Japan’s nineteenth century corresponds to the Edo period, then Japan discovered Europe’s nineteenth century after its own nineteenth century had already finished. Japan discovered the notion of interiority at a time when the West was actually looking for a world less metaphysically conceived and less constrained by the rigidity of a strong subject and a strong point of view. The European fascination with things Japanese (Japonisme) and a world of painting that was not directly tied by the rules of perspective is related, in Karatani’s opinion, to the Japanese text’s lack of interiority or objectivity. It was exactly this lack of “spiritual depth” that the Japanese tried to suppress by turning to the Western nineteenth century. Westerners, however, started highlighting whatever of Japan could be conceived of as an absence of form, content, or structure organized around a precise and definite center. Martin Heidegger’s interest in Japan, for example , followed from the fact that he saw in Kuki Shūzō’s notion of iki, or tension of possibilities, a description of what he named Abgrund, or “abyssal depth,” which is a jump beyond the structured depth of metaphysical thought. The numerous Western studies on the Japanese concepts of impermanence (mujō) and formlessness were also results of reading Japan as a text along the lines of an exteriorized presence that refuses to be caught in the stability of a secret and hidden interiority. This condition, in Karatani’s judgment, might have slowed down the process of Japanese “modernization ” but is turning out to be a major condition for the acceleration of Japan’s postmodernism—thus explaining Japan’s preeminence in the postmodern world.4 264 Postmodernism and Aesthetics 3. “Today’s ‘modern literature’ emerged...

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