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Abstract: The historical negationist movement to rehabilitate Japanese imperialism and war crimes is strong in modern-day Japan. I argue that this movement gains critical intellectual support from Edward Said, one of the founders of postcolonial studies. Said’s influential book, Orientalism, perpetuates the colonial East-West dichotomy, dividing the world into Eastern exploited nations and Western exploiter nations. This gives weight to the negationist narrative that Imperial Japan was a liberator of oppressed Asian nations. My paper then turns to Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, An Artist of the Floating World, as a crucial representation of Imperial Japan. By highlighting only militarist and pro-Western nationalist views, each of which rely on East-vs.-West thinking, Ishiguro conceals the destructive relationships between Imperial Japan and its conquered subjects. Ultimately, this paper shows how the omission of key details in novels and theoretical texts can inadvertently serve radical political causes, such as the Japanese historical negationist movement.
Keywords: Japan, imperialism, Orientalism, Kazuo Ishiguro, East-West dichotomy
Introduction
In modern-day Japan, there is a strong movement to rehabilitate Japanese imperialism and the country’s actions during World War II. In December 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the Imperial Shrine of Yasukuni, drawing strong condemnation from both the Chinese and the South Korean government.[1] The Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to Japan’s war dead, is infamous for its enshrinement and commemoration of convicted war criminals, including the wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo and General Iwane Matsui, commanding officer of the troops who committed the Nanking Massacre.[2] In addition, the shrine’s accompanying museum, the Yushukan, justifies Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 as liberation from China, and the invasion of Southeast Asia from 1940-1942 as liberation from Western colonization.[3] This perception is reflected in the conservative faction of the Japanese history textbook controversies, whose New History Textbook, released in 2001, alternately conceals or justifies Japan’s wartime and colonial actions.[4]
These practitioners of historical negationism find an unwitting ally in Edward Said, one of the founders of postcolonial studies. Instead of challenging the narrative of Imperial Japan as a liberating force, Said’s foundational text, Orientalism, perpetuates the notion of a grand conflict between East and West, a conflict on which the Japanese negationist narrative relies. Indeed, Said transforms the East-West divide from a colonial dichotomy of barbaric and civilized into a postcolonial dichotomy of exploited and exploiter, placing Japan, as an Eastern nation, in the “exploited” category. This discourse meshes perfectly with the nationalist narrative of Imperial Japan as a champion of the Eastern people against the cruel Western exploiters, ignoring the exploitation and brutal actions committed by Japan itself.
To demonstrate the power of East-vs.-West thinking in regards to Japan, I use Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1986 novel, An Artist of the Floating World, as a case study. This popular representation of Imperial Japan features a non-linear narrative of a propagandist’s life, presenting scenes from before, during, and after World War II. This allows Ishiguro to juxtapose two stances on Japanese identity: the pre-war militarist stance and the post-war pro-Western stance. The militarist stance obscures the process of empire-building, preferring the narrative of a great battle against the European powers, while the pro-Western stance is narrowly nationalistic, with no consideration for Japan’s neighbouring countries.
By concealing Imperial Japan’s destructive relationships with its conquered peoples, and focusing exclusively on the country’s combative and sometimes-victimized relationship with the West, both Orientalism and An Artist of the Floating World are inadvertently complicit in the historical negationism practiced at the Yushukan museum, in history textbooks, and elsewhere in modern-day Japan.
Japan’s Role as the Exploited in Orientalism
Orientalism deals mainly with British, French, and American interactions with the Arab world. Nonetheless, Edward Said describes the Middle East as only one section of “the Orient,” a vast imagined geography that includes India, China, and Japan.[5] Thus, when Said describes an “Oriental,” he is indicating an individual from any region within the Orient. This equivocation occurs multiple times. For example, Said quotes a passage from literary critic I.A. Richards’ Mencius on the Mind describing the inability of Chinese philosophy to challenge Western philosophy, and states, “we can quite easily substitute ‘Oriental’ for ‘Chinese.’”[6] Moreover, he describes French Indologist Anquetil-Duperron’s expedition to India as an “Orientalist project,”[7] notes the French ambition to “‘bring Indochina into the domain of Orientalism,’”[8] and asserts that non-Europeans were placed by Europeans into multiple categories of “undifferentiated type,” including “Oriental, African, yellow, brown, Muslim.”[9] Thus, Said’s arguments about the Orient, Orientals, and Orientalism, despite relying predominantly on evidence drawn from Western scholarship on the Arab world, are implicated to extend to the East at large, including East Asia.
Therefore, Said’s interpretation of the British, French, and American relationship to the Arab world as exploitative comes to signify the Occident’s relation to the entire Orient. Said argues that there is a clear pattern to the Western exploitation of Eastern nations, with Napoleon’s 1798 expedition to Egypt serving as a prototypical example. This campaign, which combined a military invasion with rigorous documentation of Egyptian language and artifacts, served as “the very model of a truly scientific appropriation of one culture by another, apparently stronger one.”[10] Due to this inherent link between scholarship and imperial conquest, Said states that every European was “a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric” in regards to “what he could say about the Orient.”[11] At the same time, Said uncritically repeats the notion of Europeans surveying a “passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine East.”[12] Indeed, he points out that there are far fewer Arab texts about Europe, and Arab travelers to Europe, than vice versa, and calls this a “crucial index of Western strength.”[13] Thus, Said geographically identifies the exploiter as coming from the West, and the exploited as coming from the East. This stereotype has little potential to be reversed or subverted, for Said portrays Arab dominance as belonging to a bygone age, lost after the Ottoman defeat at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.[14] Moreover, Said contends that “by and large…only the Arab and Islamic Orient presented Europe with an unresolved challenge on the political, intellectual, and… economic levels,” compared to “unchallenged Western dominance” in the East Indies, China, and Japan.[15] The implication is that the Islamic world, the strongest part of the Orient, was still conquered and colonized by the Occident, so this narrative automatically applies to the rest of the East.
Said is eager to include Japan within the regions of Asia that experienced “unchallenged Western dominance,” concretizing its “exploited” role within the East-West, exploited-exploiter dichotomy. He acknowledges that “in 1638-1639 a group of Japanese Christians threw the Portuguese out of the area,” but describes this as merely an “occasional instance of native intransigence to disturb the idyll.”[16] Overall, this characterization of Japan’s long-term weakness, and its status as the exploited rather than the exploiter, provides indirect support for the narrative of Imperial Japan as a leader of exploited nations against the colonialist West. After all, if a passive, silent, supine nation cannot react against external threats, it certainly cannot act to become a colonizer.
Japan’s Actual Historical Experience
Contrary to Said’s implications, throughout its history, Japan recognized the threat of Western encroachment, and took decisive action against it. Altogether, Japan possessed the power and agency to commit destructive and colonialist actions itself, independent of the grand narrative of East vs. West.
Admittedly, dozens of European missionaries arrived in Japan after 1549, gaining an estimated 300,000 converts. Nonetheless, in 1614, the Tokugawa shogunate issued an edict that exiled all missionaries and influential Japanese Christians.[17] In response, Japan’s Christian population dwindled to 150,000 believers, who were then subsequently forced practice in secret to avoid persecution and violence by the state.[18] The impotence of Christianity is made especially clear by the resemblance of Christian material culture to Buddhist and folk religious items,[19] meaning Christianity was forced to mimic the hegemonic Buddhist-folk culture in order to survive.
Complementing the persecution of Christians was the shogunate’s isolationist sakoku policy, which forbade travel abroad[20] and limited foreign relations to Korea, China, the Ryukyu Kingdom, and the Netherlands.[21] One of sakoku’s objectives was to end the threat posed by Christian proselytizing, achieved by limiting Japan’s sole Christian trading partner, the Dutch, to private trade conducted only within the city of Nagasaki.[22] Moreover, each new kapitan of the Dutch East India Company was required to make an official visit to the bakufu government, resembling a tributary relationship.[23]
Under sakoku, Japan defied Western encroachment until the 1853 Perry Expedition, in which the American navy forcibly opened Japan to foreign trade. The Japanese elite recognized the “threat of, if not colonization, then at least political subordination to the Western powers,”[24] leading to the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a coup which replaced the feudal shogunate with the emperor and his supporters.[25] Meiji officials implemented a vast program of progressive reforms, such as creating a national army, a public education system, and a new constitution.[26] The Western-style, reformist approach of Meiji officials was motivated by the realization that “Japan could not challenge the Western powers militarily unless it adopted the means by which they themselves had become powerful.”[27] Indeed, the phrase bankoku taiji, meaning “face up to the world,” became a motivating doctrine among the ruling elite.[28]
Overall, Said mentions a minor Japanese revolt against the Portuguese, but makes the glaring omission of Japan’s state-sanctioned anti-Christian persecution, sakoku policy, and the Meiji Restoration. This reveals his ignorance of the ability of Eastern nations to resist the West, or their ability to become imperial powers themselves. Jung-Bong Choi scrutinizes Said’s omission of Eastern acts of sovereign agency and imperialism through an application of Louis Althusser’s “symptomatic reading,” a Marxist technique in which “one has to theorise the correlation between what is stated and what is omitted.”[29] As Choi summarizes, “Said’s exclusive focus on ‘Western’ empires throughout his seminal works, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, sinks into an untenable assault on the West as the epicentre of cultural and racial hostility. That is, the absence of non-Western empires in his works functions to legitimise his essentialisation of the West as owning an innate proclivity towards imperialism”[30] compared to the East. This unspoken equivocation of imperialism with the West, and not Japan, fits well with the Yushukan museum’s narrative of Imperial Japan as a liberator of colonized nations.
Admittedly, to some degree, Japan was under Western cultural hegemony following its “opening” in 1853, making it tempting to attribute its imperialism to this factor. French missionaries inserted themselves into newly opened Japan,[31] and Victorian attitudes on love and family became part of the Japanese discourse on gender.[32] For instance, the Tokugawa conception of iro, which considered love a transcendent sexual experience, was replaced with ai, a Victorian concept of “romantic but chaste love.”[33] Notably, Tokugawa Japan had a supposed third gender, the wakashu, a male youth seen as an object of pursuit for older men.[34] In the Meiji period, this “erotic triangle” of women, youths and men was superseded by a Western-inspired “genital distinction between male and female.”[35]
Nonetheless, these transformations were partly voluntary, and they were never complete. When Japanese Christians rediscovered the Catholic church in the late 1800s, no more than half rejoined,[36] as many had been “indigenized” beyond recognition.[37] Similarly, echoes of the wakashu can be found in post-Meiji images of the bishōnen, or “beautiful boy.”[38] Returning to the topic of imperialism, Barrington Moore, in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and Ellen Kay Trimberger, in Revolution From Above, have suggested that the Meiji Restoration’s near-absence of mass mobilization, as well as its conservative leaders – purely Japanese factors – led to the authoritarianism and militarism of Imperial Japan.[39] Moreover, Marlene Mayo, in The Emergence of Imperial Japan, and O. Tanin, in Militarism and Fascism in Japan, have separately concluded that Japanese ultranationalism was a synthesis of the capitalism imported from the West and indigenous samurai militancy.[40] Lastly, Mark R. Peattie suggests in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 that Japan’s expanding economic and technological power, adopted from Western practices, transformed long-standing beliefs of Japanese uniqueness and the Emperor’s divine link to his people into a theory of racial supremacy of the Japanese people in relation to other Asians.[41]
Clearly, Japan’s Meiji Restoration and subsequent imperialism cannot be seen merely as an example of Western cultural hegemony, as supporters of Edward Said might argue. Instead, the events outlined above speak to Japan’s cultural strength: the nation was able to resist Western exploiters, and in fact, it developed exploitative and imperialistic ambitions of its own. This severely undermines Said’s careless classification of Japan as one of the exploited Eastern nations, as well as the negationists’ attempt to position Imperial Japan as a liberator for these nations.
Militarists and Pro-Western Nationalists in An Artist of the Floating World
As a case study of the East-vs.-West, exploited-vs.-exploiter thinking perpetuated by Orientalism, I would like to examine Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, An Artist of the Floating World, winner of the 1986 Whitbread Book of the Year and a crucial representation of World War II-era Japan, especially for English-speakers. In his novel, Ishiguro presents two different stances on Japanese identity, both of which conceal Japan’s imperialist and colonialist practices. Instead, these viewpoints prefer to focus on Japan’s relationship with the West.
The first stance, articulated by the painter protagonist, Masuji Ono, as well as his patron Matsuda, is the militarist stance. Domestically, its goal is to erode the influence of “greedy businessmen and weak politicians,”[42] representative of Western capitalism and democracy, such that “the military will be answerable only to his Imperial Majesty, the Emperor.”[43] Internationally, the militarists advocate building an empire “as powerful and wealthy as those of the British and the French.”[44] This is symbolized by the officer in Ono’s painting, “Eyes to the Horizon,” who holds a sword “pointing the way forward, west towards Asia.”[45] The attitude of the militarists in the novel is clear: Japan has a unique identity, but it is equal to the Western powers, and must demonstrate this through empire-building.
The power of the militarist discourse, similar to the Orientalist discourse of East and West, is that it recognizes only two actors: Japan and the West. In this scenario, it is difficult to criticize Japan for asserting its strength in a world dominated by imperial powers. Besides, those empires had previously attempted to control Japan in 1853 – therefore, imperial expansion could be argued to be a form of self-defence against Western colonisation. However, the militarist discourse has a critical weakness: the existence of a third actor, namely the “Eastern” nations who sought independence from both Japan and the West, such as the Korean Empire, the Republic of Formosa, the Việt Minh, and of course, the Republic of China. To acknowledge this third actor’s existence would destroy the militarist stance, for the subjugation of these nations places Japan on equal moral grounds with the imperialist, exploitative West.
Thus, in An Artist of the Floating World, the militarists rarely refer to the subject, focusing on Japanese patriotism. To illustrate, the only reference to Sino-Japanese relations in the novel, aside from an allusion to a veteran’s suffering in Manchuria, is Ono’s and his pupil Shintaro’s participation in the “China crisis” poster campaign.[46] This vague term could be referring to the Mukden Incident, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, or the Second Sino-Japanese War in general. Conversely, Ono’s letter in support of the Migi-Hidari bar – literally meaning “Right-Left,” in reference to soldiers marching – emphasizes the “new patriotic spirit” of Japan,[47] and the “unflinchingly loyal” work of the Migi-Hidari’s supporters in regards to Emperor Shōwa,[48] without mentioning what this new ethic actually means in terms of warfare and international relations, namely an aggressive war against China. Thus, the militarist stance requires Orwellian doublethink: one must believe in imperialism, for the sake of national pride and competition with the West, while simultaneously forgetting those destructive imperial practices, which place Japan on the level of the colonialist enemy.
The militarist stance is roundly criticized in the novel by a stance emerging after Japan’s surrender, articulated by the characters Suichi, Jiro Miyake, and Taro Saito: the pro-Western stance. These characters take the East vs. West conflict and declare a victor: the West, through and through. For example, Ono’s son-in-law, Suichi, prefers the Lone Ranger, a crime-fighting American hero, over Miyamoto Musashi,[49] a morally ambiguous samurai who engaged in duels to the death.[50] Furthermore, Taro, Ono’s other son-in-law, refers to the American teachings of “democracy and individual rights” as a “foundation on which to build a brilliant future.”
However, the pro-Western stance shares the nationalist tendencies of the militarists, and is similarly silent about Japanese imperialism and war crimes. Throughout the post-war sections of the novel, the specifics of the war and Japan’s imperialism are condensed into “the past,”[51] a phrase even less descriptive than “China crisis.” When the characters talk in more detail, they discuss how the war was a disaster for Japan, without mentioning the disastrous effects of Japanese aggression on other peoples. Jiro, a former suitor to Ono’s daughter Noriko, describes the suicide of his company’s president as an apology for the company’s “certain undertakings” and “past transgressions.”[52] Jiro says this suicidal apology was directed to “the families of those killed in the war,”[53] which may include Chinese and other non-Japanese casualties, although this interpretation is weakened by Jiro’s characterization of war criminals as “the men who led the country astray,”[54] rather than the men who plunged Asia into war. Clearly, Jiro considers the culprits’ crimes against the Japanese nation to be more important than any crimes committed against the Chinese or other Asians. In addition, the president tried to commit suicide via harakiri,[55] a method which, under the feudal warrior code of bushidō, would have allowed him to die with honour,[56] rather than dying with the disdain reserved for a war criminal.
Similar to Jiro, Suichi says “the very ones who led us to disaster” are still alive, and in positions of power,[57] while the apprentice painter Enchi tells Ono, “We all know now who the real traitors were. And many of them are still walking free.”[58] Both men indict the militarists for the consequences of the war for Japan, to the exclusion of other nations. Ono later uses the same egocentric, nationalistic language, apologizing for “the terrible things that happened to this nation of ours” and the “untold suffering for our own people,” as well as acknowledging that “much of what I did was ultimately harmful to our nation.”[59] To summarize, while the pro-Western, anti-militarist stance regards the war (and by extension, imperialism) as a mistake, and demands that reparations be made by the culprits, those reparations need only be made to the Japanese people, and not to the victims of Japanese aggression and imperialism. This is East-vs.-West thinking taken to the extreme, in which Japan becomes part of the West, and the East ceases to exist .
The Third, Hidden Stance: Self-Reflection
The problem with An Artist of the Floating World is not its portrayal of its two main viewpoints. In regards to the militarist stance, I have already discussed how Meiji officials followed the doctrine of bankoku taiji, or “face up to the world,” and I have mentioned multiple works, such as Marlene Mayo’s The Emergence of Imperial Japan, which draw a connection between Japanese interactions with the West and the militarism of the first half of the 20th century.[60] Concerning the post-war, pro-Western stance, historian John W. Dower summarizes in his book Embracing Defeat that “where the victors focused on Japan’s guilt vis-à-vis other countries and peoples, the Japanese were overwhelmed by grief and guilt toward their own dead countrymen. …The millions of deaths inflicted by the emperor’s soldiers and sailors…remained difficult to imagine as humans rather than abstract numbers.”[61] To prove this argument, Dower cites an influential speech made by Nanbara Shigeru, president of Tokyo Imperial University. Nanbara’s speech emphasized repentance and atonement, but spoke only of Japan, the United States, and Britain, excluding any discussion of other Asian peoples.[62] Similarly, The Twenty-Year Whirlwind: Exposing the Inside Story of the Shōwa Period was a best-selling book throughout the first few post-war years. Its journalist authors focused on finding the culprits behind the “great ‘crime’ of bringing about ‘miserable defeat,’” and did not dwell on Japanese aggression, even omitting the Nanking Massacre.[63] Thus, Ishiguro’s portrayal of both stances is historically accurate.
The problem is that Ishiguro ignores the possibility of a stance that can transcend the dichotomy of militarism and pro-Western nationalism to acknowledge Japanese war crimes. Dower notes that “Millions had served abroad and witnessed or heard about such war crimes,” and Allied propaganda ensured that the population became aware of these events.[64] Moreover, there are numerous documented instances of Japanese people acknowledging the damage done to Asian societies, without being bound to the narrative of East vs. West, exploited vs. exploiter. Unfortunately, crimes against Koreans and Taiwanese under colonial rule were given little attention.[65] Nonetheless, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, upon learning the reality of the Nanking Massacre, reported, “‘it is shameful that not one line of truth was reported in the papers.’”[66] Meanwhile, multiple soldiers expressed regret for crimes they had committed in the Philippines, while a mother wrote to the national press, “‘if such an atrocious soldier were my son, I could not accept him back home.’”[67] Marxists and feminists wrote philosophical articles about how the atrocities reflected Japanese society as a whole, while poets expressed their reactions upon learning of what took place in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Even at the lowest level of society, Dower records that housewives and farmers “wrote letters to the Chinese people…asking how the Japanese could make amends for such terrible behaviour.”[68] Meanwhile, a draft for an “Urgent Imperial Decree” to punish war criminals illustrates the consciousness of some government officials, for the Decree blames the military clique for “‘instigating the Manchurian Incident, China Incident, and Great East Asia War, which destroyed the lives and assets of our people and various other peoples.’”[69]
By omitting self-reflective, conscientious perspectives like these, Ishiguro’s novel creates a false dichotomy between militarists and pro-Western nationalists. In turn, each of these positions relies on the East-West dichotomy perpetuated by Edward Said in Orientalism. Within this East-vs.-West thinking, Japan is either a great Eastern nation facing up to the West, or a newly Western nation that can leave the East behind, whatever crimes it may have committed against it.
Conclusion
Both Said and Ishiguro conceal Imperial Japan’s destructive relationships with its conquered peoples, and are thus inadvertently complicit with the modern-day movements seeking to erase that history. The negationist narrative relies upon the idea that Japan led an exploited East against an exploitative West in a war of liberation. By extending the frame of “the Orient” beyond the Arab world to include Japan and other regions of Asia, Orientalism automatically applies the pattern of European and American exploitation of the Arab world to the relationship between the West and Japan. Moreover, Said omits Japan’s remarkable history of independent, anti-Western action, instead portraying it as having only brief moments of resistance, and otherwise falling into the stereotype of the passive, silent, supine East. After a symptomatic reading, this omission reveals a perception that Western culture and imperialism are intrinsically linked, questioning the existence and significance of Japanese imperialism and other non-Western imperialisms.
Meanwhile, An Artist of the Floating World serves as an example of East-vs.-West, exploited-vs.-exploiter thinking as applied to Japan. Both stances presented by Ishiguro, while historically accurate, emphasize either a war against the West or a deliberate adoption of its principles. In other words, the militarist stance sees Japan as a great Eastern nation standing up to the West, while the pro-Western nationalist stance sees Japan as the latest member in a club of Western nations, able to ignore its responsibilities to its Asian neighbours. Therefore, both stances conceal the destructive interactions between Japan and its conquered subjects. This is a missed opportunity, for post-war Japan was filled with honest considerations of Japanese war crimes, as documented by John W. Dower.
Ultimately, the rigid dichotomies in Orientalism and An Artist of the Floating World unwittingly support the viewpoints of modern-day Japanese historical negationists, showing how the omission of key details in novels and theoretical texts can strengthen radical political causes. The strict dichotomies within these two texts hinder our understanding of Japan’s place in the history of empires, and its colonial and wartime subjects’ place in the history of oppression.
Callum Hutchinson is a fourth-year student at the University of Toronto studying History, English, and Creative Expression and Society. He is a 2015 BMO National Scholar.
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[1] BBC News, “Japan PM Shinzo Abe visits Yasukuni WW2 shrine,” BBC News, accessed 4 November 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-25517205.
[2] University of Virginia Law Library, “Gen. Iwane Matsui,” The International Military Tribunal For The Far East Digital Collection, accessed 27 April 2018, http://imtfe.law.virginia.edu/contributors-351.
[3] Melissa Kennedy, “Theoretical Encounters: Postcolonial Studies in East Asia,” IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship 2, no. 1 (2013): 8.
[4] Claudia Schneider, “The Japanese History Textbook Controversy in East Asian Perspective,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 617, no. 1 (2008): 110-111.
[5] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 17.
[6] Said, 254.
[7] Said, 76.
[8] Said, 218.
[9] Said, 252.
[10] Said, 42.
[11] Said, 204.
[12] Said, 138.
[13] Said, 204.
[14] Said, 74.
[15] Said 73-74.
[16] Said, 73.
[17] Ken Nejime et al, “Japan’s Christian Century (1550–1650),” Japanese Association for Renaissance Studies, accessed 12 March 2018, http://www.renaissancejapan.org/what-was-japans-christian-century/.
[18] Peter Nosco, “Secrecy and the Transmission of Tradition – Issues in the Study of the ‘Underground’ Christians,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 20, no. 1 (1993): 3.
[19] Nosco, 11.
[20] Tashiro Kazui, “Foreign Relations during the Edo Period: Sakoku Reexamined,” trans. Susan Downing Videen, Journal of Japanese Studies 8, no. 2 (1982): 288.
[21] Kazui, 284.
[22] Kazui, 289.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Mark Cohen, “The Political Process of the Revolutionary Samurai: A Comparative Reconsideration of Japan’s Meiji Restoration,” Theory and Society 43, no. 2 (2014): 143.
[25] Cohen, 140.
[26] Cohen, 141.
[27] Cohen, 144.
[28] Cohen, 157.
[29] Jung-Bong Choi, “Mapping Japanese Imperialism Onto Postcolonial Criticism,” Social Identities 9, no. 3 (2003): 328.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Nosco, “Secrecy and the Transmission of Tradition,” 15.
[32] Helen Ballhatchet, “Christianity and Gender Relationships in Japan: Case Studies of Marriage and Divorce in Early Meiji Protestant Circles,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34, no. 1 (2007): 177.
[33] Ballhatchet, 178.
[34] Gregory M. Pflugfelder, “The Nation-State, the Age/Gender System, and the Reconstitution of Erotic Desire in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” The Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4 (2007): 964.
[35] Pflugfelder, 970.
[36] Nosco, “Secrecy and the Transmission of Tradition,” 15.
[37] Nosco, 21.
[38] Pflugfelder, “The Nation-State, the Age/Gender System,” 973-974.
[39] Cohen, “The Political Process of the Revolutionary Samurai,” 165.
[40] Choi,“Mapping Japanese Imperialism Onto Postcolonial Criticism,” 330.
[41] Choi, 330-331.
[42] Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World (New York: Vintage International, 1986), 172.
[43] Ishiguro, 174.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ishiguro, 169.
[46] Ishiguro, 103.
[47] Ishiguro, 63.
[48] Ishiguro, 64.
[49] Ishiguro, 36.
[50] Ben van Overmeire, “Inventing the Zen Buddhist Samurai: Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi and Japanese Modernity,” The Journal of Popular Culture 49, no. 5 (2016): 1138.
[51] Ishiguro, 49, 94, 101.
[52] Ishiguro, 55.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Ishiguro, 56.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Stephen Turnbull, Samurai: The World of the Warrior (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003), 73.
[57] Ishiguro, 58.
[58] Ishiguro, 114.
[59] Ishiguro, 123.
[60] Choi,“Mapping Japanese Imperialism Onto Postcolonial Criticism,” 330.
[61] John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 486.
[62] Dower, 489.
[63] Dower, 491.
[64] Dower, 486.
[65] Dower, 506.
[66] Ibid.
[67] Ibid.
[68] Dower, 507.
[69] Dower, 478; my italics.
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