Epistemic (Dis)Obedience: ‘Japanese’ Theory, Structural Inequality, and Kokusai Nihongaku

1 Introduction: ‘Japanese’ Theory and a Global System of Knowledge

The question of ‘Japanese’ theoretical models and concepts invokes, among other things, two assertions about the operation of knowledge. One is that all theories are inherently provincial and, thus, cannot reflect in their premises heterogeneous human experiences grounded in spatiotemporal specificities. But, in reality, theorising practices are dominated by ‘the West’, whereby a theory developed in ‘the non-West’ does not have immediate purchase outside the location where it is developed. The scholarly interest in developing ‘Japanese’ theory and concept, thus, reflects a desire to treat ‘Japan’, in the words of Carol Gluck, not as ‘elsewhere’ but ‘everywhere’.^[1] This brings to the fore the second assertion about the operation of knowledge, which is that the purported insignificance of ‘Japanese’ theory and concept in a global system of knowledge is a consequence of structural inequality inherent in that system, which privileges a certain location as a natural ‘home’ of theory and concept. As a host of research in the past few decades points out, ‘the West’ has been regarded—and has regarded itself—as a powerful place to theorise myriads of human experiences, while ‘Japan’, along with other locations outside Euro-America, has remained a place to apply, test, and amend theory. All too often, a theory developed in ‘the West’ travels to ‘the non-West’, moulds it into the object of knowledge, and fashions analyses “based largely on the particular and contingent histories, structures, power formations, and selective, and often idealised narratives of ‘the West’.”^[2] A theory forgets, while travelling, its own provinciality. It is with this forgetfulness that ‘the West’ continues to assume a privileged position as a natural ‘home’ of theory, as the subject of all knowledge, while relegating ‘the non-West’ to the eternal object of knowledge.^[3]

But here is a conundrum. While these two assertions about the operation of knowledge are intimately intertwined, they do not have a teleological relationship to one another. The development of a ‘Japanese’ theory does not automatically lead us to the dissolution of structural inequality inherent in a global system of knowledge. And vice versa, the dismantling of structural inequality does not automatically prepare an enabling condition for a ‘Japanese’ theory. Why so? The answer lies in purpose. The purpose of developing a ‘Japanese’ theory is to elevate ‘Japan’—its experiences, its history, its socio-cultural structures, and its power formation—to the status equal to ‘the West’. In contrast, the purpose of dismantling structural inequality of a global system of knowledge is to erase these geographical, historical, and cognitive categories such as ‘Japan’ and ‘the West’. This is because every home of theory, be it ‘Japan’ or ‘the West’, is, as James Clifford succinctly points out, “someone else’s periphery or diaspora.”^[4] If researchers continue to operationalise these categories to mould theories and analytical concepts, then there will always be some kind of structural inequality.

This article discusses a scholarly attempt to establish a teleological link between the development of ‘Japanese’ theory and the dismantling of structural inequality in a global system of knowledge, which, in my opinion, has not been entirely successful for a number of reasons. However, precisely because of its failure, it serves as a cautionary tale for us, researchers of Japan, to continue reflecting on the location of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’ theory, as well as our own endeavours in knowledge production.

More specifically, the attempt this article attends to is a field of research and education known as kokusai nihongaku (国際日本学: International/global Japanese studies).^[5] Since the early 2000s, observers of Japanese higher education have been witnessing the emergence and popularisation of kokusai nihongaku as a new organising category of research and educational programs at Japanese universities. Degree courses are offered; extra modules and curricula are implemented; research is conducted; overseas students and academics are recruited; the collaborative global research network is expanded—all under this appellation, kokusai nihongaku. And yet, the name itself does not reveal much about what exactly kokusai nihongaku entails. It even sounds somewhat counterintuitive. What is international and global about research and educational programs that take, at least as the name suggests, a nation-state, ‘Japan’, as their primary parameter? The name, as it seems, is thrown over a wide array of research and educational programs like a dress, but altogether remains as a disproportionate appellation.

Thus, as I am acutely aware, for many observers, kokusai nihongaku is not worthy of recognition as a serious endeavour, let alone as a promising locus to address all at once the issues of ‘Japanese’ theory and structural inequality of a global system of knowledge. Indeed, if we are to view, as many observers do, kokusai nihongaku solely as an educational and institutional project that partakes in the government-led policy of internationalisation of Japanese higher education, then we find it a politically loaded but intellectually empty project. However, what is often overlooked is a small collection of texts and debates, which seeks to define what kokusai nihongaku can and should do as an intellectual project within a global system of knowledge. To be sure, these texts and debates represent rather dispersed than concerted efforts. There is no coherent, self-conscious community of the researchers of kokusai nihongaku, and their involvement in kokusai nihongaku is often accidental. These texts and debates that seek to make sense of kokusai nihongaku are almost like afterthoughts of those who happen to become involved in new institutional endeavours but who are not always prepared to undertake intellectual objectives—assuming there are some, at least—of these endeavours. Nonetheless, these texts and debates are interesting, for they offer some points of reflection on what it means to continue operationalising the geo-cultural marker ‘Japan’ in a global system of knowledge when, in fact, ‘Japan’ is a protean historical and cultural space.^[6]

The immediate purpose of this article is to attend to these texts and debates. As I seek to demonstrate, kokusai nihongaku as an intellectual project participates in a long genealogy of Japan’s attempt to produce self-knowledge (knowledge of ‘Japan’ produced in ‘Japanese’ academia) vis-à-vis knowledge of ‘Japan’ produced elsewhere, mostly in ‘the West’. It seeks to reconfigure the relationship between these two kinds of knowledge by mitigating disproportionate power dynamics within a global system of knowledge. And, mitigation—or what some researchers involved in kokusai nihongaku call ‘metascience’—comes in two forms.^[7] One is to challenge the ontological stability of ‘Japan’ as the object of knowledge. This involves heterogenising otherwise homogenous imagery of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’ and attending to transnational and transcultural networks that make up the contours of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’. The underlying idea here is that, in so doing, one can challenge the rigidity of foundational categories of a global system of knowledge, such as ‘Japan’ and ‘the West’. The other form of metascience involves reflecting on the language of communication. At the core of this metascience is an argument that Japan’s self-knowledge must be communicated to those outside Japan not through a ‘monolingual address’ but through a ‘heterolingual address’ in order to foster a truly open interaction between ‘Japan’ and the world, between self-knowledge and knowledge of Japan as the anthropological other. ‘Heterolingual address’, according to researchers of kokusai nihongaku, would enable them to stake a claim for ‘Japanese’ theory without invoking a nationalist sentiment and without disproving other available theories developed elsewhere. With these attempts of metascience, kokusai nihongaku as an intellectual project seems to prefigure an enabling condition for epistemic disobedience.

And yet, these two forms of metascience remain contradictory to one another. The heterogenisation of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’ is at odds with a ‘Japanese’ theory that seeks to generalise a myriad of ‘Japanese’ experiences. A ‘Japanese’ theory defeats the purpose of transnational and transcultural perspectives. Self-knowledge pitted against knowledge of Japan produced in ‘the West’ reinvokes the stability of foundational categories, such as ‘Japan’ and ‘the West’. The geo-cultural qualifier ‘Japanese’ remains as a vindication that a ‘Japanese’ theory is not possible without the unspoken sovereign of all theories, that is, ‘the West.’

The problem, as I see it, derives from the persisting allure of methodological nationalism. A call for attending to heterogeneity within ‘Japan’ and to transnational and transcultural networks that make up ‘Japan’ is issued, under the aegis of kokusai nihongaku, without a meaningful attempt to actually unlearn the tacitly assumed isomorphism of ‘Japan’, ‘Japanese’, and the nation-state. A call for heterolingual address presumes incommensurability between ‘Japan’ and the world, reiterating the notion of ‘Japan’ as a stable, singular, and unified entity. Metascience, whichever form thereof one may pursue, is haunted by the spectre of the nation-state, by the very cognitive device that sustains the structural inequality in a global system of knowledge and that continues to privilege ‘the West’ as the silent referent of all knowledge. Kokusai nihongaku, an attempt at epistemic disobedience, becomes an instance of epistemic obedience.

Kokusai nihongaku, so far, has failed to offer a convincing account for developing a ‘Japanese’ theory and simultaneously dismantling structural inequality inherent in a global system of knowledge. However, I suggest we might reverse the commonly posed question—what are the limitations of kokusai nihongaku?—and instead ask, what does kokusai nihongaku and its failure have to say about knowledge production in a context marked by multiple belonging, intersectionality, socio-cultural transgression, and liminality? In other words, we might take kokusai nihongaku and its failure as an instance to revive some important questions about the operation of knowledge today. Is it possible to liberate the self and self-knowledge from the confines of the nation-state? Is self-knowledge possible without preparatorily assuming ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’? Can the reality of multiple belongings, intersectionality, socio-cultural transgression, and liminality be reflected in the nexus between self-knowledge and the nation-state? Who has unmediated access to self-knowledge of Japan? Does anyone? Informed readers will notice that these questions are not entirely new, as others have already partially addressed them. Following, among others, Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s notion of ‘liquid area’,^[8] my argument is that it is not sufficient to simply point to the protean nature of the category of self and the other, ‘Japan’ and ‘the West’; what is equally necessary is to liquify the locus of the researcher, which has also been tied to adjectives such as ‘Japanese’ and ‘Western’.

2 The Locus of Problematisation

Some critics are quick to dismiss kokusai nihongaku as a politically loaded but intellectually empty signifier. Such scepticism is not unfounded, but only to a qualified degree. As a new organising category for degree courses and curricula, as an appellation for educational programs, kokusai nihongaku is undoubtedly a politico-institutional project to internationalise Japanese higher education in the context of globalisation.

In theoretical terms, the internationalisation of higher education is defined as “the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of postsecondary education.”^[9] It encompasses a multitude of objectives, including creating more accommodating higher education, achieving practical economic goals through mobilising the national educational system, and offering broadening academic and educational experiences.^[10] But, in the politics of education in Japan, internationalisation is a far more compound notion. It was initially popularised in the 1970s to replace the then-prevalent notion of modernisation. It was subsequently politicised in the 1980s with Nakasone Yasuhiro’s infamous slogan ‘kokusai-kokka nihon’ (国際国家日本: Japan as an international country), based on his conviction in “one state, one language, one nation.”^[11] Since then, internationalisation in Japan has “almost always been discussed” among political ranks “in relation to the issue of Japanese identity” and, therefore, instrumentalised as a form of nationalism.^[12] In this context, the internationalisation of higher education has become part and parcel of the political effort to mobilise research and education to promote Japan’s national interests. The 2000s saw an especially pronounced political emphasis on this entanglement of the nation-state, education, and internationalisation.^[13] Political centres viewed higher education and research as a “source of national strength” and internationalising higher education as “for the future of the Japanese nation.”^[14] Attaining ‘global standards’ of research, education, and institutional operation, increasing ‘international competitiveness’ of Japanese universities, and promoting ‘excellence’ on a par with leading institutions of the world—all were for re-establishing Japan’s foothold in the globalised world and maximising national interests.^[15]

The internationalisation of higher education was not merely a rhetorical device to appeal to nationalist sentiment and score political points. For university administrators, it represented a new strategic orientation. Crucially, though, they regarded internationalisation not as a means to tap into the sentiment towards the Japanese nation but as a means to respond to far more immediate challenges besetting their institutions. Demographic changes resulted in a decline in the number of prospective students.^[16] There were increasing demands from the corporate world for a new breed of employees, the so-called ‘gurōbaru jinzai’ (グローバル人材: global human resources), competent in the global labour market.^[17] There was a necessity to attract external funding as the corporatisation of universities began to constrain universities’ finances.^[18] There was a need to address a myriad of institutional expectations, ranging from being adept at neoliberal performativity to getting rid of the reputation of being ‘playgrounds’ for students and academics.^[19] Given these institutional challenges, internationalisation was, at least in theory, a promising, desirable, and even necessary solution for university administrators. They viewed internationalisation as a pretext to increase the recruitment of overseas students and academics to mitigate the effect of demographic changes; to reform curricula to cater for global human resource development; to create more external funding opportunities; and to provide a backdrop for building a global reputation through research output. The internationalisation of higher education, thus, forged an ecosystem that is mutually beneficial for politicians, bureaucrats, and university administrators.

This complicit relationship between the political and the institutional foregrounded the development of various funding schemes for internationalisation, including the 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program (2002–2006), Global COE Program (2007–2014), Program for Strategic Research Foundation at Private Universities (2008-), Global 30 Project (2009–2013), Top Global University Project (2014-), and World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) (2007-). Many courses and programs established under the aegis of kokusai nihongaku during the 2000s were the beneficiaries of these funding schemes. Examples include the Research Center for International Japanese Studies at Hosei University (HIJAS), the School of Global Japanese Studies at Meiji University, the International Center for Japanese Studies and Institute for Japanese Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and the Global Japan Studies Program at the University of Tokyo. Given the increasing institutional interest in developing kokusai nihongaku, and in order to coordinate these dispersed institutional efforts, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) took the initiative in 2016 and founded the Consortium for Global Japanese Studies, whose members today include 24 Japanese universities and 58 overseas institutions.^[20]

And yet, the reality of kokusai nihongaku as an educational project today is rather disenchanting for all kinds of reasons. First, there is no consensus on what exactly the internationalisation of higher education entails in practice, especially when applied to degree courses and curricula. There is no one-fit-all notion of internationalisation. Its oversimplified and yet ambiguous notion promoted by the political centres, epitomised by empty signifiers such as ‘global standards’ and ‘global human resource’, has become, in fact, a hindrance to addressing a multifaceted approach in practice.^[21] The supposed bearers of internationalisation, namely students and academics, are said to have been underprepared, especially in terms of research exchanges, and even lack a basic understanding of global research and educational trends.^[22] Consequently, educational programs offered under the aegis of kokusai nihongaku are often watered down into, for example, a wide range of random subjects taught in English or by foreign instructors; various introductory courses catered for overseas students to promote ‘proper’ understandings—whatever they may be—of Japanese culture, history, and language; and postgraduate degree courses on Japan conducted in English, which, in a greater scheme of things, not so distinct from existing courses except their lingua franca. To develop some educational orientations, at least attempts have been made to locate kokusai nihongaku as an institutional locus to materialise pedagogical jargon. For example, the notion of ibunka-kan kyōiku (異文化間教育: inter-cultural education), popularised in Japanese higher education in the 1980s, has been repurposed for educational projects implemented as kokusai nihongaku. Also introduced is the concept of kyōdō (協働: collaborative learning) to promote active learning and collaboration with students from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, including those from overseas. And yet again, these attempts often transpire into measurable and rather convenient qualifications, such as exchange programs, overseas students and academics on campus, and English language proficiency. In general, this disenchanting reality suggests that there is no consensus on what should be taught and how it should be taught under the aegis of kokusai nihongaku. Researchers tasked with teaching kokusai nihongaku have diverse disciplinary backgrounds and thematic interests, such that there is no self-conscious community of kokusai nihongaku researchers to develop a coherent pedagogical strategy. Even the consortium organised by Nichibunken—the obvious site where concerted efforts could have been made to establish specific educational and pedagogical orientations—has become a mere platform to repackage existing quantitative measures of top-down internationalisation and to re-present them as seemingly new developments.

At the heart of kokusai nihongaku as an educational project lies a rather familiar imaginary geography, which reifies succinct distinctions drawn along the national line between Japan and the world, between Japanese and non-Japanese. This reality, then, leads some observers to surmise that kokusai nihongaku, as a new appellation for educational programs, is indeed symbolic, if not empty, merely representing “positive sound-bites” to conceal persistent political and popular sentiment towards the nation and national culture.^[23] Kokusai nihongaku appears to be another institutional manifestation of the “superficiality” of Japan’s internationalisation.^[24] To this end, scepticism is not wholly unfounded if we are to view kokusai nihongaku as an educational project.

And yet, these scathing criticisms are not concordant with the concerns expressed by those actually involved, as researchers and instructors, in kokusai nihongaku. There is a sense of discrepancy between criticisms of kokusai nihongaku as an educational project and scholarly discussion—albeit reactionary to those politico-institutional developments briefed above, and albeit limited in its scope and quantity, but nevertheless, interesting and worth attending to—on how to do kokusai nihongaku not as an educational but as an intellectual project.^[25] For those involved, the question is not simply about the tacit alliance between politics and institutions of knowledge. Nor is it merely about mobilising research and education for a nationalist cause. The question also concerns the nature and operation of knowledge they seek to produce or are expected to produce under the aegis of kokusai nihongaku.

Researchers of kokusai nihongaku address this question in two distinct yet intertwined ways. Some are concerned about what makes knowledge of Japan produced in Japan ‘international’. Tsuchida Kōsuke, a researcher specialised in art and aesthetics, succinctly summarised the issue upon being appointed as a lecturer of kokusai nihongaku at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

What does kokusai nihongaku do as a mode of knowledge production? What exactly are we supposed to investigate? And how? Our official website stipulates that it is to illuminate Japan from an ‘international perspective’ and reflect on the image of ‘Japan in the world’. Yet, this common term ‘international’ is convoluted, to say the least. Can Japanese culture be considered international when compared to other cultures? If we describe Japanese culture in a foreign language, does it suffice to call it international? Think of the following statement: What I do is ‘international’ because I specialise in kokusai nihongaku and intellectually engage with things Japanese. This is a mere tautology and not a sufficient reason for knowledge production to be ‘international’.^[26]

This is a salient expression of his suspicion that, for knowledge of Japan and its production to be ‘international’, repositioning Japan vis-à-vis other cultures, whether in method or in research language, is not enough. Becoming ‘international’ in knowledge implies something much more fundamental.

Other researchers, then, interpret ‘international’ as a signpost to reconsider for whom knowledge of Japan is produced and to whom it is communicated. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, the political obsession with internationalisation turned into a damning assessment that humanities and social sciences at Japanese universities fundamentally lacked ‘international’ activities.^[27] For the political ranks and bureaucrats, the problem was the long-established insularity of Japanese academia and the consequent trade deficit that existed in the interaction between self-knowledge and knowledge of Japan produced in ‘the West’.^[28] Following up on this assessment, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) established a working group in 2008 to develop tangible solutions. Its 2011 report offered detailed diagnoses and a wide array of recommendations for the fields of history, sociology, political science, law, and economics. Despite the scope, however, much of its claims rested on one specific problematisation: Japanese academia remained a consumer of knowledge of Japan produced outside Japan and failed to produce knowledge of Japan that would satisfy the interest of researchers abroad.^[29] For problematisation already embeds within itself a possible solution, these recommendations boiled down to one recurring trope: ‘hasshin’ (発信: transmission) of Japan’s self-knowledge to the world.^[30] This is, of course, not an innocuous proposition. ‘Transmission’ presumes unidirectional dissemination of knowledge from the sender, Japan, to the receiver, the world, that is presumably not yet enchanted with that knowledge. When submitted to the political obsession with internationalisation as a form of nationalism, transmission became a strategy of nation-branding, of disseminating ‘correct’ understandings of Japan.^[31] Researchers of kokusai nihongaku view this notion of transmission—and all that is encoded in the notion—as problematic, as being at odds with a set of what they believe are fundamental rules of academic engagement. Takata Kei, sociologist and associate professor at HIJAS, maintains that academia must be a “public” space, a community that is organised as a “horizontal” and “open” space of inter-actions.^[32] For this reason, even assuming that a trade deficit exists, transmission cannot be an appropriate strategy for academic engagement. The question for Takata is not how to transmit ‘correct’ understandings of Japan to the world, but rather how to narrate Japan as Japanese to those outside, as a “heterolingual address,” which he argues fosters meaningful interactions between self-knowledge of Japan and knowledge of Japan produced elsewhere.^[33]

At the heart of kokusai nihongaku as an intellectual project lies a series of questions pertaining to the nature and operation of knowledge underpinned by the trope of the self vis-à-vis the other and the trope of self-knowledge vis-à-vis knowledge of the anthropological other. These researchers are asking, what kinds of knowledge are they pursuing in a global system of knowledge with the geo-cultural marker ‘Japanese’? Is the object of knowledge ‘Japan’ preparatorily given or made possible by the scholarship? How can they narrate Japan as Japanese vis-à-vis the world without invoking nationalist sentiment? How can they reconfigure the relationship between self-knowledge and knowledge of Japan produced in ‘the West’, which has been marked by imbalance and which has been exacerbating a sense of insularity and inadequacy in Japanese academia in its relation to scholarships abroad?

3 A Short History of Nihongaku

The self and the other, self-knowledge and knowledge of the anthropological other—this is a familiar pattern of juxtaposition that, for a long time, dictated the production of knowledge about Japan. Here is one ascertainable fact. ‘Japan’ has been the object of knowledge for orientalist scholarship and area studies in Euro-America. Of course, ‘Japan’ did not experience the naked authority of ‘the West’, which Edward Said once argued as being integral to Orientalism and to which many other locations of ‘the non-West’ were subjected.^[34] This is due to Japan’s historical and cultural location in relation to Euro-America. ‘Japan’ did not hold any cultural, philological, or religious significance to ‘the West’ as it had no Nineveh or Babylon, no Jerusalem, no Ilium.^[35] ‘Japan’ was not the West’s past. There was no urgency among those Euro-American specialists of Japan to mould their object of knowledge into the original location of their own histories and cultures. Yet, from Basil Hall Chamberlain’s Things Japanese (1890) to Edwin O. Reischauer’s The United States and Japan (1950), from Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) to Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One (1979), there are abundant examples of knowledge of Japan produced as knowledge of the anthropological other, each of which has set certain parameters of what ‘Japan’ is and ought to be. At the same time, as is the case for many other non-Western locations, Japan has a long tradition of producing knowledge about its own history, culture, and identity.^[36] From Shiratori Kurakichi’s The Genealogy of the Japanese Language (1935) to Chie Nakane’s Japanese Society (1967), from Watsuji Tetsurō’s A Climate: A Philosophical Study (1935) to Maruyama Masao’s Studies in Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (1952), there is a wide array of examples of self-knowledge produced with specific parameters to define, present, and represent ‘Japan’. The upshot is that, in the field of knowledge, there have always been two kinds of positionality in producing knowledge about Japan. One views ‘Japan’ as an anthropological object, and the other as a repository of self-knowledge. There have also always been some interactions between them, between Japan’s self-knowledge and knowledge of Japan produced in ‘the West’, in the form of complicit exoticism, as an effort to correct misperceptions, or as a manifestation of power structure.^[37] Japan’s self-representation and self-knowledge have always been entangled with the image and knowledge of ‘Japan’ projected by external observers.

Kokusai nihongaku, as an intellectual project, also participates in this familiar entanglement of the self and the other, self-knowledge and knowledge of the anthropological other. To clarify this underpinning further, let me take a brief historical detour as a form of preparation and locate kokusai nihongaku within the genealogy of the field of self-knowledge production, known as nihongaku (日本学: studies of Japan), which was first established in the 1930s and subsequently refashioned in the 1970s and 1980s.

The primary impulse of establishing pre-war nihongaku was twofold: to distinguish ‘Japanese’ from other imperial subjects, such as Taiwanese and Koreans, as the subject of its own knowledge; and to produce a kind of self-knowledge that would legitimately distinguish ‘Japan’ and the Japanese Empire from other empires.^[38] At the centre of this effort to establish and naturalise colonial differences and imperial differences through knowledge production was the concept of kokutai (国体: national essence). In inscribing nihongaku, Ōzeki Masakazu (1902–1970), who, as a professor of philosophy at the Keijō Imperial University, sought to harness his scholarship for Japan’s imperial and colonial project, wrote as follows.

Nihongaku is to reflect on, embody, and clarify the national essence [kokutai 国体] and investigate the future orientation that this imperial nation [teikoku 帝国] must pursue on the basis of kokutai. […] As Japan is about to make a great leap forward, our empire envisions building a new order in East Asia […]. All subjects across the empire have already pledged to unite under kokutai and to adhere to imperial rule. In other words, kokutai is and has always been the very beacon for the future of our country. The primary purpose of nihongaku is, thus, to thoroughly study it.^[39]

Kokutai is surely a cumbersome term. It was initially used in the mid-19th century by the likes of Aizawa Seishisai (1782–1863), a prominent scholar of the Mitogaku tradition (水戸学: Mito School) with anti-Christian and anti-Western tendencies, as a concept to designate the spiritual unity of ‘Japan’, epitomised by the imperial household. And then, in early Meiji, kokutai became a conceptual device to incorporate the Japanese imperial tradition into the modern political system of constitutional monarchy. However, by the 1930s, kokutai came to designate the essential truths of ‘Japan’, which were beyond logic and reason but which nonetheless foregrounded the legitimacy of Japan’s imperial and colonial expansion. Here, nihongaku was envisioned not merely as a locus to clarify the foundational truths about the national community. It was envisioned also as a locus to mould ‘the Japanese’ as the embodiment of such truths. In this way, ‘the Japanese’ would become the subject of its own knowledge (producing self-knowledge of the national community) and the subject acting upon this knowledge (operationalising this knowledge for imperial and colonial expansion).

Even if we acknowledge that every knowledge is political, Ōzeki’s idea of nihongaku is exceedingly and brazenly so.^[40] But this, in the 1930s and 1940s, was simply representative of the prevailing climate of academia, where research and education were increasingly expected to align with the political and ideological discourses of the empire. Towards the end of the 1930s, the first Konoe cabinet and the succeeding Hiranuma cabinet implemented a series of legislative measures to reconstitute universities as institutional embodiments of kokutai.^[41] Accordingly, some influential chairs were established at imperial universities with the aim of expanding the scope of research and education on Japanese particularities and their Asiatic origins.^[42] A politically led committee was established to organise, coordinate, oversee, and promote the works and activities of scholarly associations of the humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences.^[43] Upon request from the Ministry of Education, universities, high schools, normal schools, and other specialised technical schools began to implement a series of lectures to promote a ‘correct’ understanding of Japanese culture, not only to Japanese students but also to students from the colonies.^[44] In this climate, Ōzeki was hardly alone in promoting nihongaku as a new institutional and intellectual locus for reconfiguring the notion of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’ and operationalising self-knowledge in the service of Japan’s imperial and colonial project. His contemporaries, such as Urabe Naosuke (n.d.-n.d.), an editor and writer at a right-wing publication outlet Tōfūkaku, also argued for nihongaku as a scholarship to recuperate ‘Japan’ as “an organic community” based on “uniquely Japanese thought, politics, and economics” and to re-enact ‘Japanese’ as the bearer of such community.^[45]

Behind the impulse for establishing pre-war nihongaku lie two agendas: assimilation and differentiation. On the one hand, nihongaku was conceived as a means of redefining parameters of the ‘Japanese’ nation whose legitimacy could be found in the presumed primordiality of kokusai. By moulding historical facts, cultural productions, and socioeconomic structuration into self-serving imagery of a benevolent imperial state with primordial organic unity, nihongaku prepared a discursive condition to legitimise expansionist tendencies as a historical necessity and as a pretext for assimilating colonial subjects into the fold of kokutai and transforming them into imperial subjects. This rhetorical appeal to benevolent imperialism, organic unity, and historical necessity, in turn, enabled those involved in pre-war nihongaku to stake a claim for two kinds of difference. The first was the difference between ‘Japanese’ imperial subjects and other imperial subjects, including Ainu, the people of the Ryūkyū Islands, Taiwanese, and Koreans. While all subjects were the subjects of the emperor, the assertion was that the ‘Japanese’ occupied a privileged position as the original ethnic nation formed upon kokutai and, therefore, as the natural leader, benefactor, and protector of the benevolent empire. The second difference was forged between this benevolent Japanese empire and other empires. Nihongaku’s imagining of the ‘Japanese’ subjects, the ‘Japanese’ nation, and the ‘Japanese’ empire invoked European empires as the silent referent, the antithetical, whose dominance, according to those researchers of nihongaku, was fabricated through violence and discrimination and whose legitimacy did not derive from a historical necessity nor a natural mandate.

Thus, in a broader scheme of things, pre-war nihongaku can be read as an intellectual effort to carve out Japan’s historical positionality in relation to ‘the West’ and ‘Asia’ by redefining the self and producing self-knowledge that would undergird Japan’s imperial and colonial project and simultaneously undermine its disenchanting reality of violence, domination, and subjugation. Of course, many of nihongaku’s claims and discourses are dubious to scholarly sensitivity today. But its appeal to (quasi-)scientificity and (quasi-)objectivity warranted this scholarship a certain authoritative voice. The general conviction that scholarly knowledge was undergirded by notions such as science, objectivity, truth, and fact enabled researchers of pre-war nihongaku to present otherwise arbitrary concepts of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’ with rigidity and certainty.

Not surprisingly, much of the post-war reconfiguration of nihongaku focused on this complicity between Japan’s self-knowledge production and its imperial and colonial project. For example, Umehara Takeshi (1925–2019), a philosopher and key figure of post-war nihongaku who later became the first Director-General of Nichibunken, succinctly summarised the widely shared post-war sentiment that the foundational premises of self-knowledge, that is, those categories of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’, had to be reoriented away from the wartime ideology.

We can legitimately surmise that pre-war nihongaku was […] exceedingly nationalist in its character and embodied parochial nationalism [kokusuishugi 国粋主義] that asserted kokutai, which sustained an extremely fierce hostility towards Confucianism and Buddhism. […] A kind of scholarship I propose here, which I venture to call nihongaku in its truest sense, is one that challenges the hitherto prevalent and yet decidedly narrow and parochial scope of self-knowledge production.^[46]

On the face of it, Umehara’s claim was a call for intellectual disjuncture. And yet, beneath it lies a sense of continuity manifested in his emphasis on nihongaku in its truest sense—a continuous adherence towards the ‘Japanese’ nation as the repository of the self. The disjuncture is not in discursive structure, but in the post-war desire to recuperate ‘Japan’ from the narrow and parochial nationalism of the pre-war period.

The obvious question was of how. How could one challenge and move beyond the kind of nationalism that had gripped the pre-war production of self-knowledge without undermining the historical and cultural underpinnings of ‘Japan’? To be sure, pre-war nihongaku did not hold an exclusive franchise on producing self-knowledge. Umehara and his contemporaries acknowledged contributions made by the Kyoto School and the tradition of tōyōshi (東洋史: Oriental History) to the pre-war studies of the ‘Japanese’ self.^[47] And yet, they were ultimately adamant about the efficacy of the Kyoto School and Oriental History in reviving nihongaku in a post-war context. For them, these pre-war scholarships were inadequate because they relied, in their theoretical premises and analyses, on instances that were unmistakably ‘non-Japanese’, including intellectual, spiritual, and cultural traditions of China, India, and elsewhere.^[48] For the same reason, they also viewed the post-war development of Marxist tradition and modernisation theory with equal suspicion.^[49] Applying these theoretical models, which were borrowed from elsewhere, to ‘Japan’ was tantamount to moulding what was otherwise uniquely ‘Japanese’ into a vision of ‘Japan’ forged elsewhere. At the core of the vision of new post-war nihongaku was, therefore, a conviction that ‘Japan’ must be understood with its uniquely ‘Japanese’ nature and that nihongaku must pursue the historical and cultural essence of ‘Japan’ that was untarnished by politics, the political, and the foreign.^[50]

How could one, to use Umehara’s own words, “discover new truths” about ‘Japan’ untethered by the idea of a nation tied to the modern political identity of the state?^[51] How could one disassociate historical and cultural manifestations of the ‘Japanese’ nation from politically tainted modern nationalist sentiment? Here, researchers of post-war nihongaku sought to establish a hermeneutic circle of discovery, methods, and reflections. As their argument goes, for the discovery of new truths about ‘Japan’, new methods are necessary because “methods determine how we view the world.”^[52] The development of new methods requires reflection on the axioms of pre-war nihongaku, as doing so creates a new space for new knowledge—that is, the discovery of new truths. Through this hermeneutic circle, these researchers then sought to forge a moment of gestalt switch, that is, a moment of abrupt cognitive shift, delinking Japan’s historico-cultural essence from modern nationalist sentiment. In other words, they saw their particular task as to recuperate ‘Japan’ as an organic unity from the perils of the modern. Thus, Umehara maintained that the “logos” of the organic ‘Japanese’ community could be excavated from the Jōmon period (ca. 14000-300 BCE).^[53] Kenmochi Takehiko, a scholar of comparative modern literature, argued that “the structure of consciousness of the Japanese nation” was already manifest in Kojiki (712) and Nihon shoki (720) and suggested, in a manner that invoked Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), that the natural environment, a constant for millennia, prefigured the cultural essence of ‘Japan’.^[54] Kasuya Kazuki (1930–2014), a prolific essayist who paved the way for post-war literary conservatism and realism in Japan, concluded that the “national essence” of ‘Japan’ could be located in the “national tendency” formed prior to the formation of the modern nation-state.^[55] As these examples indicate, post-war nihongaku presumed, as did pre-war nihongaku, that ‘Japan’ existed as a bounded organic community, as the solid repository of the ‘Japanese’ self, and hence as the stable object of self-knowledge. The contestation was simply that this object did not depend on kokutai but on ‘Japanese’ primordial culture, organic unity, and national consciousness.

Alas, in a perverse way, post-war nihongaku continued to operate as a strategy of assimilation and differentiation. Under the rubric of an organic community, the reality of ethnic, linguistic, and historical heterogeneity was reduced to a homogenous imagery of Japan. This is not to say that, in post-war nihongaku, histories of, for instance, Ainu and Ryūkyū were completely erased. Behind the idea of an organic community was the rhetoric of temporal differentiation, whereby Ainu and Ryūkyū were incorporated into Japan’s past as “an anthropological treasure house,” as Morris-Suzuki succinctly criticises, “whose contents revealed the shape of things as they were in the beginning, and as they had once been throughout the entire Japanese archipelago.”^[56] Umehara’s description of the Ainu community is indicative of such representational violence enabled by temporal differentiation. He argued that the hunter-gatherer culture of the Jōmon period continued to exist “in its purest form” within the Ainu community.^[57] This kind of temporal differentiation was effective in assimilating differences within ‘Japan’ into the purported historical unity and cultural essence. In this way, the effacement of heterogeneity also prepared an argument that would reposition history and culture firmly within the bounded yet extremely malleable space of ‘Japan’. This ‘Japan’ with historical unity and cultural essence, in turn, became a qualifying marker to reinforce boundaries between ‘Japan’ and the world.

This conviction in the primordial unity of ‘Japan’ was not entirely an anomaly of nihongaku. It was a familiar trope for the popular genre of nihonjinron (日本人論: theories of Japanese) and numerous “works of cultural nationalism concerned with ostensible ‘uniqueness’ of Japan in any aspect.”^[58] Nihongaku’s suspicion towards ‘non-Japanese’ conceptual and methodological imperatives was also evident in nihonjinron and culturalist schemas, which exhibited “a conceptual and procedural hostility to any mode of analysis that might seem to derive from external, non-Japanese sources.”^[59] One can also draw a parallel between an argument such as Umehara’s and the then-prevailing approach in history and social sciences, that is, modernisation theory, which sought to narrate Japanese history as one without disruptions. Researchers of post-war nihongaku were generally sceptical of the applicability of modernisation theory to Japan, for it was essentially a foreign ideo-intellectual product. And yet, nihongaku’s historical and cultural essentialisation of ‘Japan’ as an organic community that predated the nation-state nonetheless added contours to the explanatory principle of modernisation theory, which expected unceasing historical transitions from feudalism to democracy and capitalism. This is because to view history, as modernisation theory does, demands “the appeal to fixed cultural values” as the anchor for “uninterrupted continuity, and an endless present derived from an exceptionalist experience.”^[60] In other words, post-war nihongaku’s appeal to an organic community with historical unity and cultural essence enabled researchers to locate ‘Japan’ within this expectation of continuity. Post-war nihongaku offered a locus to summon “values and experience attesting to a cultural endowment that had survived since time immemorial […] as an explanation for both economic and technological success and the absence of conflict in the nation’s history.”^[61] While some researchers of nihongaku were rather openly adamant about modernisation theory,^[62] there existed an undeniable complicity between the self-knowledge production of nihongaku and the theoretical expectation of modernisation theory imposed by ‘the West’. Modernisation theory prompted Japanese researchers to incorporate, consciously or otherwise, the West’s expectations “to fulfil a narrative about themselves, produced by others, elsewhere.”^[63]

Recognising this, then, we run against the basic problem of “intellectual dependence” and “the asymmetries of knowledge production”^[64]—or else, what I have been calling structural inequality in a global system of knowledge.

4 Kokusai Nihongaku as Metascience

One inference I shall draw from this brief history of nihongaku is that, for Japan’s self-knowledge production, there are two recurring tropes: the presumed ontological stability and homogeneity of ‘Japan’; and the asymmetrical relationship between Japan’s self-knowledge and knowledge of Japan produced in ‘the West’. These tropes, as some researchers even go so far as to maintain, have since become the general malaise of Japanese academia, variously characterised as “inward consciousness,” “nationalistic narcissism,” or “hikikomori nationalism.”^[65] Under these conditions, they view kokusai nihongaku as an enabling platform, albeit politically tainted, to search for effective prescriptions for the malaise, or at least to mitigate its ramifications, and to reorient Japan’s self-knowledge vis-à-vis knowledge of Japan produced in ‘the West’ towards something open, horizontal, and symmetrical.

More is at work here than a repudiation of the past. If post-war nihongaku had a tendency to divorce itself from its past—that is, pre-war nihongaku—and to bypass any meaningful reflections on the past operation of self-knowledge, kokusai nihongaku seeks to do the opposite. For those involved in kokusai nihongaku, the past operation of self-knowledge is a constitutive element, or the point of departure, for what is dubbed “metascience,”^[66] which refers to scholarly efforts to reflect on foundational premises of self-knowledge production. More specifically, metascience concerns the following questions. How can one liberate the self from the entrapment of historical and cultural essence? How can one dislocate the asymmetrical conceptual matrix of self-knowledge and knowledge of the anthropological other? How can one engage with the objectified self (knowledge of Japan produced in ‘the West’) and narrate the self (self-knowledge) without fulfilling the external expectations and without feeding nationalist sentiment? In short, metascience encompasses inquiries into what makes knowledge of Japan—whether produced as self-knowledge or as knowledge of the anthropological other—possible.

In practice, those inquiries can be generally categorised into two orientations. One is onto-methodological. This strand of metascience seeks to challenge the ontological premises of ‘Japan’ as a stable object and to attend to the ever-shifting boundaries of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’. The other is epistemic. It addresses the structural inequality between Japan’s self-knowledge and knowledge of Japan as the anthropological other produced in ‘the West’, seeking to overcome the predicaments of a global system of knowledge by establishing an alternative communicative strategy between these two kinds of knowledge.

5 Conclusion: A Protean Positionality

If we are to view ‘Japanese’ theory—and a possibility thereof—simply as an antidote to existing theories mostly derived from Euro-American experiences, we can certainly find, in the past and the present, ample examples.^[102] Some of these ‘Japanese’ theories have surely travelled from their home to other locations, as is customary for any theory, to collect, translate, and generalise someone else’s experiences. But the very presumption of ‘Japanese’ theory, in fact, embeds within itself far more fundamental issues about theory-building practices in a global system of knowledge: the conceptual matrix of ‘the West’ and the rest, the structural inequality between them, the tension between Japan’s self-knowledge and knowledge of Japan produced in ‘the West’—just to name a few. Any attempt to develop a ‘Japanese’ theory must also address those issues that necessitate and even justify the very attempt in the first place. Kokusai nihongaku, as an intellectual project, addresses, or at least seeks to address, this conjuncture between ‘Japanese’ theory and broader structural and epistemic issues about the operation of knowledge.

And yet, there is an undeniable sense of impasse. Kokusai nihongaku as metascience ends up either invoking those reductionist claims for historical unity and cultural essence of ‘Japan’ or rehearsing complicit exoticism that reiterates problematic power dynamics between ‘the West’ and the rest. At the core of kokusai nihongaku lies a familiar conceptual matrix of the self, ‘Japan’, and the nation-state: a persistent imagination of the self that is intimately tied to a collective community called ‘Japan’, which is equated to the modern nation-state. In other words, the vested interest in narrating ‘Japan’ as ‘Japanese’ and in challenging structural inequality in a global system of knowledge is, in practice, transfigured into a desire to recuperate self-knowledge from its self-incurred crisis characterised as ‘inward consciousness’ or ‘nationalistic narcissism’. Attempts to address the conjuncture between ‘Japanese’ theory and broader structural and epistemic issues, then, become mere ventures to redraw parameters of self-knowledge on the a priori established matrix of the self, ‘Japan’, and the nation-state. For this reason, kokusai nihongaku has missed an opportunity to dismantle anthropological differences between ‘Japan’ and ‘the West’ or between ‘Japanese’ and minority communities; to disentangle the conceptual tethering of ‘Japan’ to the nation-state; and to unlearn the self that has long been qualified primarily as ‘Japanese’. Desires for epistemic disobedience turn out to be, in a perverse way, instances of epistemic obedience.

The problem is the conceptual matrix of the self, ‘Japan’, and the nation-state. The problem also lies in the juxtaposition of two categories of knowledge—self-knowledge and knowledge of the anthropological other—made possible by that conceptual matrix. Today, these foundational parameters of knowledge production have become somewhat obsolete, given the reality of multiple belonging, intersectionality, socio-cultural transgression, and liminality. And yet, these parameters have also remained intact, not least for the operation of knowledge. What I am alluding to is the necessity to reconsider the very categories of the self and self-knowledge. Is it possible to liberate the self and self-knowledge from the confines of the nation-state? Is knowledge of the self possible without preparatorily assuming ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’? Can the reality of multiple belongings, intersectionality, socio-cultural transgression, and liminality be reflected in the nexus between self-knowledge and the nation-state? Who has unmediated access to self-knowledge of Japan? These questions about Japan’s self-knowledge production, in turn, open up a Pandora’s box also for the operation of knowledge in area studies. Questioning the adequacy of Japan’s self-knowledge is a reflection of knowledge of Japan produced in ‘the West’, which remains confined within the institutional category of area studies and within the purportedly stable cognitive category of the other. What does the premise of ‘Japanese’ theory and concept say about area studies in a global system of knowledge? Is it possible for researchers of area studies to challenge structural inequality in a global system of knowledge, while the very inequality warrants a license for area studies to objectify, anatomise, and generalise ‘Japan’? These are, in essence, questions about the positionality of researchers, of producers of knowledge.

In fine, my suggestion is to reconceive the positionality of researchers—whether Japanese or non-Japanese—as inherently protean, constantly shifting, and always unstable. In her proposal of ‘liquid area studies’, Tessa Morris-Suzuki aptly argue not only for “the need to conceive of the geographical space we study as ‘liquid’” but also for the necessity “to ‘liquify’ the process of area studies itself.”^[103] It is true that her focus is placed rather on how to liquify an ‘area’—including ‘Japan’—by attending to “flows and vortices,” and she does not expand much on how to liquify the locus of the researcher.^[104] But if we are to take the failure of kokusai nihongaku as a cautionary tale, the idea that the researcher occupies a protean positionality is, I argue, precisely the gist of the story. Just as ‘Japan’ is a cultural and historical space that is protean in its nature, so too is the position we occupy as researchers. We may sometimes exist outside of ‘Japan’ and at other times within. And from this epistemological and ontological recognition that, to rephrase Carol Gluck’s notion for my purpose here, we are indeed ‘everywhere’, a new approach that is not tied to the problematic matrix of the self, ‘Japan’, and the nation-state may emerge.