Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This is an impious book--every bit as irreverent as it is enlightening, and certainly the more entertaining for that fact... The essays that make up the volume set out to remove Japan from the cultural and geopolitical vacuum in which it paradoxically finds itself and position it instead within a truly global framework for critical analysis." --Edward Fowler, Journal of Japanese Studies
Table of ContentsJapan in the World / Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian 1
The World
Japan's Industrial Revolution in Historical Perspective / Tetsuo Najita 13
The Prussia of the East? / Perry Anderson 31
Racism and the State: The Coming Crisis of U.S.-Japanese Relations / Eqbal Ahmad 40
"Past Experience, If Not Forgotten, Is a Guide to the Future": or, What Is in a Text? The Politics of History in Chinese-Japanese Relations / Arif Dirlik 49
Archaeology, Descent, Emergence: Japan in British/American Hegemony, 1900–1950 / Bruce Cumings 79
Society
Constructing a New Cultural History of Prewar Japan / Miriam Silverberg 115
The Spirit of Productivity: Workplace Discourse on Culture and Economics in Japan / Christena Turner 144
Culture
The Novelist in Today's World: A Conversation / Kazuo Isiguro and Eo Kenzaburo 163
Soseki and Western Modernism / Fredric R. Jameson 177
America's Japan/Japan's Japan / H. D. Harootunian 186
In a Labyrinth of Western Desire: Kuki Shuzo and the Discovery of Japanese Being / Leslie Pincus 222
Return to the West/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsuro's Anthropology and Discussions of Authenticity / Naoki Sakai 237
The Invention of English Literature in Japan / Masao Miyoshi 271
Theory's Imaginal Other: American Encounters with South Korea and Japan / Rob Wilson 316
The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Postcolonial World Order / Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto 338
Index 355
Contributors 363
