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345 12 What Is Japan to Us? Andrew E. Barshay I have cribbed my title from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short article “Geok-Tepe: What Is Asia to Us?” Written in 1881, this was a meditation on Russia’s civilizing mission and destiny as a European and Asian empire. My own purpose is post-Dostoyevskian and post-imperial: to offer an analytical overview of the relationship between the humanities and social sciences in the field of Japanese studies since 1945.What has Japan been—and what is Japan now—to us? How has Japan been constituted in the professional fields of inquiry that have taken it as their chief object? Why should there be such a field as “Japanese studies” in the United States? Beyond such academic questions, what is the broader significance of “Japanese studies” in American intellectual life, that is, to “us”?1 For the United States 1945 marks a rise to global power, pursued and maintained over the course of a five-decades-long rivalry with a self-avowed “socialist ” world that was, in its own way, also a self-denying empire. Victory over the Axis, whose constituent regimes had held power through the massive mobilization of political viciousness against naturalized ethnic “others,” compelled the United States to pursue social inclusiveness with a renewed moral mandate. There was no excuse not to do so. At the same time, under the aegis of “development ,” liberal noblesse oblige and rivalry with socialism brought Americans into unprecedented levels of contact with “other” peoples. Insofar as the humanities represent an attempt to understand the workings of the world, its communities and conflicts, through the frame of culture and values, it was natural that they should play a significant role in promoting both social inclusion and global intercultural ties. To what extent have they done so, or—intentionally or not—worked to marginalize or exclude significant groups from American political and intellectual life? How well did the humanities assist American society in redeeming the cost of victory overseas by striving to make that society more just? As the full dimensions of that cost were revealed—not only in lives lost and peoples shattered, but in the nuclearization of imperial rivalry in full knowledge of what happens when such weapons are used against actual human beings—did the humanities rise to the occasion? Andrew E. Barshay 346 For Japan, and therefore for the study of Japan, 1945 stands first of all for the moment of defeat, total and unconditional; it stands for the experience of a country and empire laid waste and defeated by the United States and its allies, including at the last moment the Soviet Union. Defeat, loss, and occupation were the first authors of Japan’s “postwar.” More urgent than explaining victory , perhaps, was the task (taken up on both sides) of explaining the war that preceded and produced Japan’s defeat, and on that basis (and all too teleologically ) to consider the prehistory of that war in Japan’s imperial society of the early twentieth century. For those who came to the professional study of Japan any time around midcentury, the perception that the recent war had social roots was widely shared. To explain that war and prevent the next one, it was necessary to acquire and apply a broad understanding, rather than just restricted, opportunistically gained “intelligence,” to the question “What is Japan to us?” The Prehistory of Japanese Studies: A Few Episodes The Japanese intellectual historian Maruyama Masao (1914–96) proposed that the “history of thought” occupy itself with four “levels” of ideas: moving from “top” to “bottom,” these were: (1) that of “abstract and systemized theories and doctrines” such as Thomism; (2) a broader level composed of “views and images of the world” (Weltanschauungen); (3) particular opinions and attitudes; and (4) “feelings, moods, and sentiments about life that lie below the surface of man’s conscious awareness.” The task of the intellectual historian is to show the interrelation of these levels of “ideas” in order to grasp their “value, meaning , function, or role.” As a general rule, Maruyama holds, “it is the relatively high levels of thought which give orientation, that is to say, direction and goals, to ideas. . . . An awareness of goals . . . moves from the higher to the lower levels, while the energy of thought, that energy which can be said to propel ideas, rises from the lower to the higher. . . . Energy alone does not know in which direction to move, or what function to play...

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