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  • Romancing the East, Rejecting the West:Japanese Intellectuals' Responses to Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century
  • Kevin M. Doak (bio)

Orientalism, a particular discursive infatuation with the East, has often been represented in terms of a personal encounter with the bizarre, the exotic, the other. Implicit in this approximation of orientalism is a modern Cartesian notion of identity invested in the personal ego that finds its double—and its conditions of being—in the irreducible external form of an otherness that is as singular and particular as the form of identity invested in a unique personal self. But what if a shared cultural identity, rather than an individualist encounter with otherness, is mobilized to question this structure of individual identity and collective difference as itself a Western fantasy? What happens if the romance of the East comes not from within this logic of Cartesian identity but from within the context of a modernity that is global, spatial, and collective rather than European, philosophical, and individualistic? Indeed, what if, in this orientalist desire to project the supplement to the self's liberation, one finds not the repetition of the binary opposition of West oppressing East, but a particular site of the "East" that, in opposing the "West," constructs its own orientalism over others within the realm of the "non-West"? What happens to the logic of self and other then?

Early-twentieth-century Japanese discourse on China provides an important site for exploring such questions. It problematizes one's thinking about cultural difference, the logic of nation and foreigner, and the ironies behind claims of difference as liberation, whether as a justification for Japanese imperialism or as a means to legitimate a Japanese revolt against the West. With particular clarity, it reveals how efforts to identify and mobilize something called "the East" (or "the West") become ensnared by the desire to make the East and the West stable things, objects of hermeneutical analysis, when they are, at best, only projections of qualities that are simultaneously dreaded and longed for, images conjured up in the process of making claims on shared identities, dreams that fade away when exposed to the light of dawn.

I begin by stating the obvious: all attempts to arrest the strangeness of the other within concepts such as "the East" or "the West" are inevitably undercut by the irreducible nature of alterity. For whether conceived as the mirror image of the self-aware modern self or as the collective other to the imagined West, alterity itself resists the act of knowing (even while it is always the necessary supplement to a belief in the possibility of knowledge), just as the desire to know the other can never be fully satisfied by any particular representation of otherness or of the stranger. There is therefore no inherent advantage in trying to embrace the East in the collectivity of nationality rather than seeking it in the singular forms of exotica: the freak, the ghoul, or the bizarre. But when the East is mobilized as resistance to the familiar, then there may be some strategic advantage to exploring the strangeness of collective representations, [End Page 402] especially nationality, as an ironic trope of the individual identity that rests at the core of modern forms of knowing.

To illustrate the ever-recessive illusion of the East as a mode of alterity, one needs to move beyond the usual optic: narratives of national identity that the West tells about its others, or counterhegemonies raised in the name of the East against the West. One needs to broaden one's view to encompass narratives that Japanese intellectuals projected about the otherness of those whom they put within a common topos of the East as part of a larger strategy of a revolt against the West. It goes without saying that national identities represented from within the same conceal as much as they reveal about alterity. Looking at national formation from outside, yet as part of a common topos of "the East," especially as part of the process of imperialism (which has often been understood as a project of erasing nationalities, not forming them), allows one to expose the strangeness of nationality by questioning the plausibility...

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