The famous ‘ambiguities’ in Japanese attitudes towards China are often said to be rooted in nineteenth-century Japanese imperialism and its first major product, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. A wellknown statement of this view, for instance, is that by the novelist Ōe Kenzaburō in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 1994:

Similarly, in a recent theoretical study of Meiji literature, Atsuko Ueda, invoking the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha's idea of ‘colonial mimicry’, argues that ‘[Meiji] Japan's desire for authoritative power (the desire to become ‘the West’) seeks out a more barbaric other (in this case ‘Asia’)’. Furthermore, she claims, by its ‘mimicry’ of the West, and especially by its acquisition of an advanced knowledge of Western civilization, Japan could justify its ‘imperial longing’ and claim ‘ superiority over China, a clear contender to the position of leader in East Asia’. Thus, among the various different stances towards continental Asia current in Meiji Japan, one finds both pan-Asianism – usually including a call for Japan to take over the leadership of Asia – and also datsu-a or a call for the de-Asianization of Japan. Paradoxically, and I think in a typically Japanese fashion, these two positions were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Ueda paraphrases the intellectual historian Hashikawa Bunzō, who pointed out that there were ‘cases where a valorization and strong contempt for China coexist in an individual, despite their overtly contradictory characteristics’.

But I would like to ask here: did this split in Japan's national identity, this ambivalence towards Asia and towards its own Asian identity, this double-edged sword of ‘valorization’ on the one side and ‘contempt’ or defiance on the other, really begin only in the nineteenth century, because of the encounter with the West?