Another “Paris in the Orient”: Overlapping Exoticism in Japanese Modernism around 19301

This article attempts to analyze modernism as exoticism in Japanese modernist writings around 1930, especially those concerning encounters in the East Asian cities of Shanghai and Harbin. While a Japanese writer absorbed the aesthetics and politics of Orientalism in terms of “modernization,” the framework, such as the West/non-West, the Occident/Orient, the savage/civilized, capitalism/communism, cross their borders, amplify, and overlap the contradiction or the ambivalent identity of Japanese imperialism through the process of translating Western exoticisms into a Japanese context. From this viewpoint, it can be said that “modan” (モダン, modern) signifies the encounters of the East and West in the geographical and political sense, and the Japanese modernist literature represents that struggle that took place on the cultural-political stage in East Asia. This is modernism in Japan, and could be modernism itself.