Nostalgia for a (Different) Asian Modernity: Media Consumption of "Asia" in Japan

Over the 1990s Japan's gradual tilt toward Asia was clearly visible. Following a long retreat after the 1945 defeat, Japan began reasserting its identity as an Asian country only in response to the rising economic power of other Asian states. It had never truly ceded its regional influence, but in fact, the new “Asia” Japan is rejoining has had, in cultural geographic terms, to be reinstated in the Japanese national imagination in the last decade. Japan's so-called return to Asia, therefore, should be understood as a strategic project. Returning has involved Japan in a process of reconfiguring its position within a familiar prewar, pan-Asianist narrative that allows it to assign itself the (imperialist) mission of leading the “backward” Asian nations while simultaneously stressing cultural and racial commonality among Asians. While overall representations of Asian societies and cultures have risen dramatically, Japan's historically constituted Orientalist trope of an “Asia behind the times” still informs most national media markets. In this conception Japan is always in and yet always above Asia.¹ However, the problem is that 1990s “Asia” is no longer amenable to the older image of a traditional, underdeveloped neighbor available to Japan's civilizing mission. In fact, Japan's return to Asia is taking place largely in response to its own national imperative, since it is Japan that faces real challenges to its (re)constructed national/cultural identity in an era of widely proliferated Asian modernities. Consequently, it is also Japan confronting an increasingly visible gap that separates a discursively constructed “backward Asia” from actually industrializing or already highly modernized neighboring Asian states.

This article thus focuses on Japan's encounter with “Asia” through what I call popular Asianism. I mean by this term Japanese media representations of “Asia” generally, but in particular Hong Kong popular culture and Japanese audience reception of it. In this latest cycle of reengagement, as Japan has struggled through the so-called bubble economy and confronted serious social contradictions, what I am finding is a tendency to characterize other modernizing Asian nations as possessing the social vigor and optimism Japan is alleged to be hemorrhaging or to have lost. I propose that while consumption of Hong Kong popular culture by Japanese audiences tends to be informed by nostalgic longing, more is at stake than nostalgia. Hong Kong is held to be the modern equal of Japan in saliently promoted and widely consumed cultural artifacts. This current nostalgia is thoroughly infused with something Japan actually never had, which is a different mode of non-Western mimetic modernity. So the recognition of Hong Kong's synchronous temporality with Japan actually displaces the notion of Japanese cultural superiority and generates self-critical insights into Japanese modernity itself. Thus, while consumption of Hong Kong popular culture in Japan does not indicate a critical engagement or effort to dismantle prevailing conceptions of “Asia,” the consumption of popular culture has become a site where the continuities, rearticulations, and ruptures of historically constituted “Asia” in Japan are complexly manifested. It is these contradictions that I will attend to in this article.

Capitalist Nostalgia for “Asia”

Once regarded as a symptom of extreme homesickness, nostalgia has become a key term to describe the modern and postmodern cultural condition.

² Frederic Jameson has argued that nostalgia and pastiche are central features of late capitalist image production. Nostalgia is no longer what it was under modernism, the empiricist representation of a historical past; in the postmodern age, it has become the appropriation of “the ‘past' through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness' by the glossy qualities of the image.”³ At the same time, the acceleration of the transnational circulation of images and signs, contact with other cultures, and the expansion of tourist industries have facilitated “the global institutionalization of the nostalgic attitude.”4 As the development of communication technologies has intensified mediated contact with cultural...