Rethinking Japanese Studies: Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region

Eurocentrism—the dominance of Western Europe and the US as the audience and intellectual foil in Japanese Studies—has long been apparent to scholars of Japan around the world. This book critically examines Eurocentrism in Japanese studies from the perspective of the Asia-Pacific region, thereby perhaps helping to overcome Eurocentrism to enable a Japanese Studies that is more globally balanced. The first chapter, by Kaori Okano, states that ‘one of the key reasons behind the publication of this book is that we believe it is timely to critically reflect on Japanese Studies from a distance, from the periphery or margins of knowledge production’ (p. 1–2). Okano defines Eurocentrism as the domination of the rest of the world by the West and by the ideological view positing the West as the centre and everything else as periphery. The author then explores the complexities of the term at different levels. She makes the critical point that area studies, unlike subject-based academic disciplines that seek universalistic claims, are in a particularly good position to counter Anglophone-centric knowledge production in that area-studies scholars typically have a language other than English in which to communicate (p. 12)—in this case, Japanese. Eiji Oguma, in the second chapter, makes the point that many of Japan’s sociocultural characteristics boil down to the simple fact that ‘it has a large domestic market within relatively [well-] defined borders’ (p. 22): a useful exercise in reductionism for those proclaiming the explanatory primacy of Japanese culture. This, Oguma argues, explains why Japanese scholars of Japan write in Japanese, whereas native scholars of other, smaller Asian societies tend to write in English, and this in turn explains why Japanese scholars often have little impact beyond Japan.