'Japan' in the Western Imagination: A Voyage of Ideas into the Past

Naoko Shimazu (Birkbeck)

Chair: Professor Steve Dodd (SOAS, University of London)

Abstract

This lecture examines how ‘Japan’ came to be constructed as a system of knowledge in the Western imagination throughout the last four hundred years, from the time of ‘the Christian Century’ in the sixteenth century to the twentieth-century. What happened to ‘Japan’ – a body of knowledge based on encounters that had been constructed by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century? Why did Japan become ‘Japan’ in Gulliver’s Travels in the early eighteenth century? What was new about the ‘Japan’ that the Victorian travellers like Isabella Bird and Rudyard Kipling discover in the late nineteenth century? Did conditions of modernity change how ‘Japan’ came to be reconstructed in the twentieth century? This lecture is an imaginary journey into the past where ‘Japan’ is moulded into a variety of cultural and political shapes, sometimes stretched beyond recognition.

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Speaker Biography

Naoko Shimazu is Professor of History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London. She obtained the BA Hons degree in Political Studies from the University of Manitoba, and MPhil and DPhil degrees in International Relations from the University of Oxford. This year, she spent six months as a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, and, in April, gave the Marius B. Jansen Lecture at Princeton University. Her major publications include Imagining Japan in Post-war East Asia (co-editor, Routledge, 2013), Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Nationalisms in Japan (editor, Routledge, 2006), Japan, Race and Equality: Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (Routledge, 1998), as well as scholarly articles in Modern Asian Studies, Political Geography, Russian Review, Journal of Contemporary History, War and Society. She serves on the editorial boards of Japan Forum, Reviews in History, Modern Asian Studies, Theory, Culture and Society, The Historical Journal. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Professorial Associate of Japan Research Centre at SOAS, a former fellow of the Japan Foundation and the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her current major project is a research monograph, Diplomacy as Theatre: The Bandung Conference and the Making of the Third World.

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