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Old and New Japonisme: The Tokugawa Legacy and Modern European Images of Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Jean-Pierre Lehmann
Jean-Pierre Lehmann
Affiliation:
Euro-Asia Centre, INSEAD, Fontainebleau
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Extract

Individuals and societies are as much influenced and motivated by perceptions of reality as by reality itself, indeed possibly more so. It is in that sense that the images which one society holds in relation to another are highly significant in terms of an understanding of the relationship between the two. Japanese officials tend to stress that problems which exist between Japan and Europe are due to ‘misunderstandings’—and indeed the fact that Endymion Wilkinson's book on Europe and Japan (‘Misunderstanding’) has proved such a best-seller in its Japanese version, GOKAI, indicates that it struck a sensitive chord among the Japanese public. In other words, the image, it is alleged, is out of focus with reality. Presumably an aspiration, and an entirely legitimate one, in the mounting of the Great Japan exhibition was to redress and improve Japan's image in the West, namely by stressing the cultural legacy with the intention of diverting attention from the more powerful industrial dimension.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , October 1984 , pp. 757 - 768
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1 Wilkinson, E., Misunderstanding (Chuokuronsha, Tokyo, 1981).Google Scholar

2 The original text of the New Japonisme is Kahn's, HermanThe Emerging Japanese Superstate (Andre Deutsch, London, 1971); this appeared two years prior to the oil crisis—and, in fact, neither the words oil nor energy appear in the appendix, nor are the problems related to these discussed in the text!—but it was especially after Japan's recovery in 1975 that Khan-type views of Japan increased and proliferated.Google Scholar

3 The Old Japonisme and the cultural productions it led to are described in Miner, Earl, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1966)Google Scholar, and Schwartz, William L., The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature (Edinburgh and Paris, 1926).Google Scholar

4 Current issues of, for example, the Harvard Business Review, Columbia Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, etc., almost invariably include one or more articles on Japanese management techniques.

5 See Shackelton, Robert, ‘Asia as seen by the French Enlightenment’, Iyer, R. (ed.), The Glass Curtain Between Asia and Europe (London, 1965).Google Scholar

6 The bold headline of a full-page advertisement in The Economist of 24–30 October 1981, p. 107, announcing a conference on Europe and Japan.

7 Pascale, Richard T., and Athos, Anthony G., The Art of Japanese Management (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Drucker, Peter, ‘What we can Learn from Japanese Management’, Harvard Business Review (1971)Google Scholar; and ‘Behind Japan's Success’, Harvard Business Review (1981); Vogel, Ezra’, Japan as Number One (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gélinier, Octave, Morale de la compétitivité; leçons du Japon pour la France (Paris, 1981)Google Scholar; Ouchi, William, Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge (Reading, Mass., 1981).Google Scholar

8 At the November 1982 GATT ministerial meeting the Japanese delegation stated that Japan's market is the most open in the world.

9 See Said, E., Orientalism (London, 1978)Google Scholar and Lehmann, J. P., ‘Mutual Images’, in Tsoukalis, L. and White, H. et al. , Japan and Western Europe (London, 1982).Google Scholar

10 See Bolt, C., Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, 1971)Google Scholar and Kiernan, V. G., The Lords of Human Kind (London, 1969).Google Scholar

11 Kipling, R., From Sea to Sea (London, 1909), p. 335.Google Scholar

12 Hearn, L., Japan: An Attempt At Interpretation (New York, 1907), p. 488.Google Scholar

13 Quoted in Norman, H., The Real Japan (London, 1908), p. 192.Google Scholar

14 See Lehmann, J. P., The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to World Power 1850–1905 (London, 1978), ch. 3.Google Scholar

15 See Schwartz, Imaginative Interpretation, p. 131.

16 See Yokoyama, T., ‘Mitford and Murata—Two Critical Minds on Popular Images between Britain and Japan in the Early Meiji Period’, Proceedings of the British Association for Japanese Studies, History and International Relations, vol. 5, pt 1 (1980).Google Scholar

17 Mounsey, Augustus, The Satsuma Rebellion (London, 1879).Google Scholar

18 Stevenson, R. L., Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London, 1923), p. 106, 116–17.Google Scholar

19 See Lehmann, Image of Japan, ch. 6.

20 See, for example, the picture of PM Suzuki reviewing troops of the Self Defence Force in The Times of 2.12.81 with the caption ‘In the footsteps of the Samurai’.

21 For a particularly grotesque example, see the front cover of the Newsweek issue of 9 August 1982, where under the headline of a special report ‘Japan's High Tech challenge’, one sees a phenomenally fierce samurai-robot menacingly sallying forth from a computer.