What is the connection between the United States' imbalance of
trade with Japan and the imbalance of translation in the other
direction? Between Western literary critics' estimates of Japanese
fiction and Japanese politicians' "America-bashing"? Between the
portrayal of East-West relations in the film "Merry Christmas, Mr.
Lawrence" and the terms of the GATT trade agreements?
In this provocative study, Masao Miyoshi deliberately adopts an
off-center perspective--one that restores the historical asymmetry
of encounters between Japan and the United States, from Commodore
Perry to Douglas MacArthur--to investigate the blindness that has
characterized relations between the two cultures.
Both nations are blinkered by complementary forms of
ethnocentricity. The United States--or, more broadly, the
Eurocentric West--believes its culture to be universal, while Japan
believes its culture to be essentially unique. Thus American
critics read and judge Japanese literature by the standards of the
Western novel; Japanese politicians pay lip service to "free trade"
while supporting protectionist policies at home and abroad.
Miyoshi takes off from literature to range across culture,
politics, and economics in his analysis of the Japanese and their
reflections in the West; the fiction of Tanizaki, Mishima, Oe;
trade negotiations; Japan bashing and America bashing; Emperor
worship; Japanese feminist writing; the domination of transcribed
conversation as a literary form in contemporary Japan. In his
confrontation with cultural critics, Miyoshi does not spare
"centrists" of either persuasion, nor those who refuse to recognize
that "the literary and the economical, the cultural and
theindustrial, are inseparable."
Yet contentious as this book can be, it ultimately holds out,
by its example, hope for a criticism that can see beyond the
boundaries of national cultures--without substituting a
historically false "universal" culture--and that examines cultural
convergences from a viewpoint that remains provocatively and
fruitfully off center.
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