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Rethinking ‘Eurocentrism’ and area studies
Japanese Studies in the Asia-Pacific
Kaori Okano
Plenty of critiques of so-called Eurocentrism have emerged in many fields of academic inquiry in the post-war period. While there seems to be a consensus that Euro-American dominance in knowledge production is undesirable and that it needs to be destabilised to be inclusive of knowledge from elsewhere, concrete and pragmatic strategies to achieve this have been scarce. The aim of this volume is to critically examine ‘Eurocentrism’ in Japanese Studies in the Asia-Pacific (i.e., outside the Euro-American centre) and to contribute to this debate from an area studies’ perspective.
Debates on Eurocentrism have been prevalent in the context of postcolonial studies. We have been told repeatedly that the Anglo West has exerted an unhealthy dominant influence in knowledge production and constitutes its centre, where universalistic theories are generated and legitimated, leaving the rest of the world at the periphery to be providers of primary sources or to apply these universalistic theories in socially and culturally particular contexts. While the so-called Anglo West (or Euro America) is not internally homogeneous (in that it has its own centre and the periphery), I use the term Anglo West (or Euro America) to refer to the established centre (core), where wealth and power (in terms of decision-making) are concentrated, as distinct from the periphery.
Australia is in the semi-periphery in that it is in the Anglophone world (where academics fully engage in global academic knowledge production) but not quite in the power centre of North America and Europe. It is a rich peripheral country with a history of British settler colonialism, whereby Australian academics originally imported theories, methods and topics from the centre and used them to examine local phenomena – like ‘a branch office’ of global centre academia (Connell, 2007, pp. 81, 85). This could result in excessive conformity to the centre’s norms in an eager quest for approval, as is seen in the ‘hyper-correction’ to norms that embodies cultural cringe. But the position of a rich peripheral country with a history of British settler colonialism could also offer a unique potential for exploring original themes and perspectives. Asia is a more margin-alised periphery than Australia, although some variations exist in terms of proximity to the centre, as we will see later in this volume. One of the key reasons behind the publication of this book is that we believe it is timely to critically reflect on Japanese Studies from a distance, from the periphery or margins of knowledge production.
The study of Japan has undergone changes in terms of its topics, approaches and dominant academic disciplines (Sugimoto, 2014a). Neustupný’s brief historical overview (1980, p. 21) suggested that study of Japan was undergoing a paradigm shift and presented a typology: the Japanology paradigm, the Japanese Studies paradigm and the contemporary paradigm.
The Japanology paradigm developed when the study of Japan lacked instrumental purposes and consequences (economic, political or military), often in the areas of philology, pre-modern history, religion and ethnography (Neustupný, 1980). It involved a very small number of people who were interested in exotic oriental societies and cultures. Scholars tended to see specialisation along regional lines (e.g., Oriental or East Asian Studies) rather than disciplines (e.g., literature and history).
The next paradigm, the Japanese Studies paradigm, emerged as modern Japan became an internationally significant figure to the extent that the study of it had instrumental value within and outside academia (Neustupný, 1980). Research outcomes were deemed useful for politics, social policies and economics, and the research agenda became more susceptible to these instrumental concerns. In contrast to the earlier Japanology, the Japanese Studies paradigm valued academic disciplines (e.g., history, politics, sociology), and more scholars were now located in these disciplines, as well as in earlier East Asian Studies Departments, which continued to house academics teaching language, literature and history. The expansion of academic disciplines studying Japan can be seen in Hall and Beardsley’s edited volume (1965), which includes sections on geography, anthropology, history, language, literature, visual arts, religion and philosophy, psychology, education, politics, law and economics. The shift was also encouraged by the prevailing academic trends where structuralism was gaining force. The Japanese Studies paradigm generally held positive views about Japan, depicting Japanese society as a group-oriented, homogenous, harmonious and well-functioning society. It embodied theories about the Japanese, called nihonjinron, which were widely accepted both in academia and amongst the public.
It was the dominance of this line of study that led Australia-based early career junior scholars Yoshio Sugimoto and Ross Mouer (1980) to question this approach and initiate a workshop in 1980 to explore these concerns. The workshop’s papers were published in a special issue of Social Analysis (Australian-based anthropology journal). Their more developed arguments were later presented in Images of Japanese Society (Mouer and Sugimoto, 1986), which became a seminal publication in the field. The debate was joined by a political historian, McCormack, as well as many others and involved reflections on Japan’s democracy and modernisation (McCormack and Sugimoto 1986; 1988).
The contemporary paradigm emerged in the context of such critical discussion in the 1970s and 1980s and emphasised internal variation (stratification), conflict and processes rather than categories, interdependence of areas of social life and determinants (Neustupný, 1980, p. 23). There was a call for the inclusion of societies other than those of the Anglo West as a point of comparison in studying Japan (Befu, 1980, p. 190). Academics held closer relationships with contemporary Japan and had higher levels of language proficiency. Neustupný (1980, pp. 23–24) saw this paradigm as more advanced in Australia, at least partly because, he suggested, the absence of the old Japanese Studies establishment at the periphery enabled early career researchers to question the American fathers of Japanese Studies from afar.
The contemporary paradigm had become mainstream by the late 1990s, at least in the academic literature. Since then the study of Japan has developed in various academic disciplines and across different regions as they grow prosperous enough to fund university research. These developments have been influenced by contemporary trends: the decline of the Japanese economy since 1990; post-colonialism in humanities and social sciences research; the rise of China; and the heightened transnational movement of people, commodities and knowledge. Transnational movements have encouraged research on Japan in relation to other societies, including migration to and from Japan, and consumption of Japanese popular culture outside Japan. Positionalities of scholars (including their geographical locations, academic training and prior experiences) have continued to impact their research.
One significant trend is the more recent global (i.e., the Anglo West’s) pursuit of quantifying research quality in the name of accountability, in the context of the transnational movement of scholarship. We have seen increasing institutional attempts to measure the quality and impact of research and to rank universities according to these criteria. These trends have pressured scholars across the globe to conform to Anglophocentric global norms in terms of research approach and output.
It is important to note that Befu (1980, p. 190) already saw a problem with an exclusive reliance on North America as a point of comparison and proposed that ‘the more divergent the cultures which are compared with Japan, the more likely we are to learn about Japan’s diverse facets.’ It seems that we have not adequately addressed this call. This is partly because academics adopted approaches of Western scholarship in studying Japan through ‘global’ social science methods and theories. Also, as non-Western societies grew prosperous, the study of Japan has spread in other parts of Asia and elsewhere, involving larger numbers of ‘local’ scholars. But many of them received training in the Anglo West and later increasingly faced institutional pressures to conform to the globally established norms in order to survive in academia. So we now seem to face a dilemma. On the one hand, the study of Japan involves a larger number of scholars more widely dispersed geographically than when Befu made the comment in 1980. However, on the other hand, this does not mean that the scholarship has become less Eurocentric. The study of Japan is likely to have become more Eurocentric now than three decades ago. This volume revisits reflexive observations about the study of Japan and examine the current situation by focusing on Eurocentrism that prevails at the periphery – in the Asia Pacific.
In this volume, we present papers from the 2015 conference of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia. The conference’s theme, ‘Rethinking Eurocentrism: Japanese Studies in Asia’ did not come from philosophical academic debates in the discourse of post-colonialism, as one might expect. Rather, it emerged from practical deliberations, when the conference organising committee (made up of a sociolinguist, a literary studies scholar and two social scientists) was exploring who to invite as keynote speakers. Someone mentioned that the conferences had long invited keynote speakers from the Anglophone centres (i.e. North America and Europe) or Japan. The majority of them gave speeches in English even though they would have been able to present in Japanese. This perhaps quite unwittingly reinforced the idea that one must present and publish their works in English to gain global recognition. At other discipline-based international conferences such as in sociology and politics, it would be impossible to present papers in a language other than English, but in Japanese Studies, the Japanese language was available as a conference lingua franca. In the end, we invited keynote speakers from Asia, including those who do not normally work in English.
This chapter begins by raising the major questions covered in this volume. It then discusses current debates on Eurocentrism and area studies to contextualise this book and explores features in Asia Pacific region. After outlining the individual chapters, it concludes by outlining original contributions to Japanese Studies and the social sciences and humanities generally. This introductory chapter thus establishes the context and underlying theoretical discussions that run through the subsequent chapters.
Key questions
In this volume, we ask the following questions.
- What variations are there amongst the academic communities of Japanese Studies in Asia? Some may use the Japanese language (as well as their own language) as the medium of communication – the People’s Republic of China (PRC), South Korea, Taiwan and some parts of Southeast Asia. Others may use the global academic language, English. From where do these academic associations seek conference keynote presenters? What are the factors affecting these differences? How might their colonial experiences of Japan (South Korea and Taiwan) or of Western countries (Singapore and Indonesia) have influenced their respective intellectual approaches?
- Is there a local intellectual approach that displays a degree of autonomy from the global scholarship in the English-using world? To what extent can we identify ‘Asian approaches’ to studying Japan? To what extent have the Japanese government’s institutions and policies (e.g., scholarships from the Ministry of Education and the Japan Foundation that enable postgraduate study in Japan) influenced the research agenda in Asia? To what extent do we see deliberate transnational collaborative work to understand mutual differences in respective regional perspectives – in this case, the point of reference is not the Anglo West, but ‘other’ Asia. Does this provide the potential for an approach with relative autonomy from the West?
- In what ways have some academic disciplines or approaches been affected by Anglo-Western scholarship to a greater extent than others? Why? To what degree has the perceived value of research on Japan to the Anglo West influenced that research agenda? (e.g., corporate management and industrial relations in the 1970s to 1980s, the study of natural disasters since the 1990s, aging population studies and popular culture research more recently).
- What are the potential contributions of Japanese Studies in the Asia-Pacific to Japanese Studies globally? Could it contribute to unsettling Anglophone universalism and promoting inclusion of academic communities sharing a language other than English? Asia and Australia can be better positioned to counter Euro-American centred scholarship because they can have alternative perspectives, located as they are at the periphery, geopolitically and academically.
Eurocentrism
We have seen plenty of critiques of Eurocentrism in the humanities and social sciences during the post-war period, in particular over the past three decades, often in the context of works of postcolonialism and Orientalism. These fields include sociology (e.g., Maia, 2014; Keim, 2011; Connell, 2007; Alatas, 2006; Rodriguez et al., 2010), cultural studies (e.g., Chen, 2010; Ang, 1998; Charkrabarty, 2000; Chow and de Kloet, 2016, Abbas and Erni, 2005), anthropology (e.g., Mathews, 2010, Ribeiro, 2006, Yamashita et al., 2004), linguistics (Abalo, 2016), translation studies (Robinson, 2016), international relations (Kuru, 2016; Hobson, 2012) and history (Lu, 2015).
Eurocentrism in the most general terms refers to the ‘reality’ whereby the West dominates the rest of the world in terms of resource distribution and decision making at certain historical times and to the view of the world or ‘ideology’ that sees the Anglo West as being central, with the rest at the periphery. But beyond this general premise, Eurocentrism can mean different things to different scholars, as can be seen at the four different levels of discussion below.
Socio-historical reality (material conditions and political circumstances)
Eurocentrism was once the socio-historical ‘reality’ of material conditions, institutional mechanisms and geopolitical circumstances when Europe dominated the world through colonisation in the 19th century. Resources and decision making were concentrated in the West. It was the ‘reality’ of power relations at all levels, which both the West and the non-West acknowledged.
While some now see that this long existing imbalance in resource distribution and decision making has gradually shifted with the rise of Asia, such change does not seem to have brought substantial changes to the Eurocentric view of the world. For example, the mono-centric view of modernity’s origin is still assumed: that modernity and the capitalist work system started in Europe and subsequently spread to the rest of the world through colonisation and imperialism (e.g., Wallerstein, 1979). Recent works have, however, challenged this taken-for-granted understanding to a degree, as we will see later. Changes in socio-historical reality do not seem have changed the Eurocentric institutional mechanisms of knowledge production and maintenance as will be discussed later.
Residual worldview or ideology
Eurocentrism is also a dominant view of the world, rooted in and reflecting the above-mentioned socio-historical reality at a given point in time. This dominant worldview (one may call it an ideology) assumes that the Anglo-West is superior to the rest of the world, in terms of resources, decision-making power about global affairs, civilisation, technology, knowledge, trade and commerce. Such a worldview grew out of the material conditions and political circumstances of the 19th century and continued to be widely accepted, although the conditions and circumstances changed with post-war decolonisation, the rise of Asia and the end of the Cold War. This is because the view is entrenched both in the centre and the periphery and because practical institutional mechanisms to maintain this ideology had long been established and continue to operate effectively. People continue to hold such a view quite unconsciously, like a habit, and without realising the consequences of their actions, which Kuru (2016) calls ‘residual Eurocentrism’.
Views of knowledge production in academia
The discourse on knowledge production in academia reflects the above Eurocentric ideology. This view regards the Anglo West as the centre (or the core) where universalistic knowledge is produced and legitimated by its gatekeepers. Researchers in other parts of the world also produce knowledge, but such knowledge needs to be approved as legitimate by the centre. Scholars explain these power relations using terms such as ‘centre-periphery structure’ (Keim, 2011), ‘core-periphery relations’ (Mathews, 2010), ‘the Global South’ in the geopolitics of knowledge (Maia, 2014) and ‘southern theory and northern theory’ (Connell, 2007).
An assumed global division of labour in knowledge production is that universalistic theories, concepts and categories are developed and confirmed at the centre (the Anglo West). The periphery provides particularistic raw data to be analysed as case studies and contribute to the development of universalistic theories at the centre. At the same time, socially and culturally specific local situations in the periphery are examined by applying universalistic theories, concepts and categories as points of reference. The centre and the periphery agree on the knowledge hierarchy that universalistic theories are a superior form of knowledge to particularistic understanding. Global academia requires scholars at the periphery to seek approval for their own work from the centre, which establishes an arbitrary set of rules to follow. This entails publishing in international journals in the English-using world.
An example is Ramanujan, the subject of the recent British film The Man Who Knew Infinity based on the biography of the same name (Kanigel, 1992). Born in colonial India at the end of the 19th century, Ramanujan possessed an exceptional passion and talent for mathematics. At Cambridge University, his approach (an intuitive way of understanding, rather than providing proofs based on logic) did not conform to the established rules in the field at the time, and his work was not recognised until he presented it in the way required by the Royal Society, with assistance from his mentor, G.H. Hardy, the eminent mathematician.
Knowledge is produced in the context of locally specific historical, social and cultural conditions. Universalistic theories are developed based on the West’s experience, but these theories are often presented and considered appropriate to analyse phenomena elsewhere – hence the call for ‘provincializing Europe’ (Chakrabarty, 2000). In some cases, scholars use case studies of particularistic practice at the periphery in Asia and Africa to enhance or elaborate on the existing theories. The reference point remains the West. For example, discussion of modernity has long assumed that Renaissance Europe spearheaded modernity and later spread it to the rest of the world via colonisation. In this view, modernisation is a sequential process modelled on the European trajectory, which th...
