Opinion and Comment

Reply to Review by Kiri Paramore

In his review of The Politics of Dialogic Imagination, published in the winter 2015 issue, Kiri Paramore seriously misrepresents the book’s argument. Contrary to what he suggests, I make it clear that my goal in using overdetermination is to go beyond the simplistic and reductive dichotomy of oppression/suppression and subversion as a way of understanding politics. Rather than attend to the book’s argument, the review wastes space discussing matters irrelevant to it (one long section on Maruyama Masao’s discussion of Neo-Confucianism, a position I neither accept nor refer to, and another on the discussion of “feelings” in kokugaku, thus missing the fact, for example, that I used Raymond Williams’s concept of “structure of feeling” as a way of getting away from the too familiar discourse on kokugaku). The review ends with a highly inaccurate characterization of the sources used: I read the bulk of the relevant English and Japanese secondary sources published in recent years and indeed benefited immensely from the new ideas and insights presented, as is evident in the bibliography and in my argument. Finally, I found the reviewer’s tone strangely cynical and aggressively dismissive of my work.

Reply to Katsuya Hirano

The history of emotionality in Tokugawa Japan is not some esoteric literary topic but rather sat/sits at the heart of xenophobic conceptions of nation. In the scholarly field, Tokugawa emotionality is linked to kokugaku because that has been the main frame through which it was analyzed: in late Tokugawa anti-Chinese thought, in Meiji anti-Chinese historiography, in cold-war U.S. scholarship’s replication of Meiji historiography to attack China, and in reactions against Meiji ideology from Maruyama onward. It must therefore be addressed critically. Hirano instead uncritically accepts the kokugaku/Meiji position as truth and then remains completely silent about the anti-Chinese politics which define his book’s topic, field, and (as I argued in the review) even approach. This silence disturbs me, because it seems to indicate acquiescence to an anti-Chinese politics of culture currently resurgent in both Japan and the United States.