Who Knows? Who Wants to Know? Defining Japanese Studies in the 1990s: Audiences and Constituencies

Who Knows?Who Wants to Know?These two simple questions allow us to look at, Japanese Studies as a flow of information or, more broadly, knowledge that passes between two interacting parties.The Japan specialist stands at the fulcrum of two of these information.flows, first on the receiving end, as the person who wants to know about Japan and pursues the answers through research; and second, as the person who knows about Japan and transmits, that knowledge to others.In the first segment of this two-part article, subtitled Changing Audiences and Constituencies, I will explore recent changes in the interactions between.specialists who know about Japan, and the expanding audience of people who want to knowabout Japan. Defining Japanese StudiesFor the past two years I have been working with the Japan Foundation and the Association for Asian Studies to produce a new edition of the Directory of Japan Specialists and Japanese Studies Institutions in the United States and Canada. 1 The purpose of the directory is to make available basic information about Japan specialists and institutions that are involved in Japanese Studies, but to a certain extent, the directory defines these categories by what it includes or excludes.I do not want to exaggerate the importance of this directory as the bluebook of Japanese Studies in the United States, but rather to share with you how the immediate and tangible problem of what should be in the directory has raised for me some more basic intellectual questions about the nature of the field and how it is changing.Before any definitions can be applied to individual cases, there has to be a pool of potential cases, and some way of locating them.In the United States there is no national association of Japan specialists to which everyone belongs.If there were, even though the boundaries of that fictional association would also be problematic, the directory might simply be its membership list and there would be no great need for the directory project.In the absence of such a comprehensive voluntary association, the directory project has had to cast its net widely across the mailing lists of all the known intellectual networks and institutions with which Japan specialists were associated.The core list was the Association for Asian Studies' large membership list, supplemented with a number of other lists from regional Japan