Off Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States

Convergences: Inventories of the Present

by Miyoshi

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 the industrial, 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.

Genres: Japan, Theory

Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Brumaire Bodbyl-Mast · Rating 5 out of 5]

Miyoshi’s “Off Center,” was brought to my attention by Edward Said in a collection of lectures over a year prior to reading it. It is very similar stylistically to Said’s works, logically, coming from the same discipline of literary analysis and the period of the deformation of the canon in the late 20th century by social critics. Off-Center attempts to analyze the then-present moment of Japan in 1991, especially in the intellectual and literary spheres, whilst attempting to avoid western and Japanese ethnocentric thinking. Miyoshi does this task with immaculate precision, though, of course, Japanese intellectual tradition and “literature” (Miyoshi does not quite like this term) are not my area of expertise. It was obviously written in a world where “Japan-bashing” dominated (arguably the fetishized version of Japan in the western conscious today is a continuation of this Orientalist ideal, though from the opposite end) was at the forefront of the American mind- and these sections can be reapplied to some extent to more contemporary concerns over Chinese success, or whatever ethnicity/nation is deemed the enemy of the west. His discussion of Mishima- though I have not read his works- proves especially interesting, as the author remains quite popular amongst Westerners, though Miyoshi thinks him a dullard. Mishima, according to the author, wrote rather uninteresting works,and wrote them rather disingenuously- with a keen ear to western desires for an exotic Japan. The book is incredibly rich, and though I do not always read literary criticism, Saidian thinkers (not to discredit Miyoshi as unoriginal) provide enough cultural context alongside the more general aethestic critiques to make it interesting enough. He has a rather interesting discussion regarding the nature of Japan in the months following Hirohito’s death, paralleling the presently recent death of Queen Elizabeth II in the UK. The discussions of intellectual decline also remain quite relevant, even if some of his conclusions prove disagreeable, his analysis is unparalleled. I cannot recommend this enough.