“In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention,” Oscar Wilde wrote in 1889. “There is no such country, there are no such people.”
Japan had opened to the West just thirty years before Wilde made this observation. Europe was awash in what the French call japonisme. Degas, Manet, Whistler, Pissarro—they were all fascinated by the imagery of Japanese tradition. In 1887 van Gogh decorated Le Père Tanguy with prints of Mount Fuji and geisha in elaborate kimono. Gauguin made gouaches on paper cut to the shape of Japanese fans. This infatuation permeated society. It was reflected on teapots and vases, in the fabric of women’s dresses, and in the way people arranged flowers.
But what did japonisme have to do with Japan as it was? The Japan of the 1880s was erecting factories and assembling steamships, conscripting an army and preparing a parliament. There were universities, offices, department stores, banks. As Wilde elaborated, “The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them.”
Wilde was ahead of his time. We now have a word, albeit a contentious one, for the phenomenon he touched upon in “The Decay of Lying.” We call it Orientalism. Orientalism meant “the eternal East.” In his account of Japan Wilde left out only the quotation marks, for he was writing about the simple, serene, perfume-scented “Japan” of the Orientalist’s imaginings.
Orientalism was made of received notions and images of the people, cultures, and societies that stretch from the eastern Mediterranean to the Pacific. There was no dynamism or movement in the Oriental society. The Orient was fixed in immutable patterns, discernible through the ages and eternally repeated, like the mosaics in Middle Eastern mosques. It did not, in a word, progress. Deprived of the Enlightenment, the East displayed no rational thought, no logic or science. The Oriental merely existed, a creature ruled by fate, timeless tradition, and an ever-present touch of sorrow. The Oriental was “exotic” rather than ordinary, “inscrutable” rather than comprehensible, dusky rather than light. The Orient was the “other” of the West, and the twain would never meet.
Japan, farthest east from the metropolitan capitals and least known among explorers, became the object of extreme Orientalist fantasies as soon as Europeans arrived, in 1542. The first Westerners to record their impressions were missionaries, who took Japan and the Japanese to be a place and a people “beyond imagining,” as an Italian Jesuit put it, “a world the reverse of Europe.” Europeans were tall, the Japanese were short. Churches were high, temples low. European women whitened their teeth, Japanese women blackened theirs. Japan was an antipodean universe, ever yielding, ever prostrate. “The people are incredibly resigned to their sufferings and hardships,” the Jesuit wrote on another occasion, “yet they live quietly and contentedly in their misery and poverty.” Francis Xavier, who arrived in 1549, asked why the Japanese did not write “in our way”—from left to right, across. His Japanese guide replied with a question that would have done Francis some good had he troubled with its implications: Why did Europeans not write in the Japanese way, from right to left, down?
The observations of sixteenth-century Europeans were not pure invention. By tradition Japanese women did blacken their teeth. An air of resignation is as evident among the Japanese today as it must have been then. And Japanese locks—a peculiar obsession among these first visitors, noted again and again—are still opened by turning the key to the left, not (as in the West) to the right. But what makes these observations faintly ridiculous? Why did they produce the enduring idea of a place populated by mysterious gnomes? From our distant point of view it was a simple failure of perspective. The early travelers made no connections: That is, the Japanese were not permitted, if that is the word, their own history, a past by which their great and small differences could have been explained.
Orientalism grew from empire. One of its features was the position of the observer to the observed: The one was always superior to the other. As Edward Said stresses in Orientalism, intellectual conventions reflected relationships based on power and material benefit. So Orientalism came into full flower in Britain and France, the great empire builders of the nineteenth century. Japan was never formally a part of anyone’s empire, but it was hardly free of the Orientalism associated with imperial possessions. Its relations with Europe were based on the same material interests and were marked by the same presumed superiority on the part of Europeans.
Today, of course, we call someone from India, Indonesia, Taiwan, or Japan an Asian rather than an Oriental. Our term is an attempt, at least, to acknowledge human complexity and diversity—and equality. To call someone an Oriental would give at least mild offense, because it would recall relations that no longer exist—at least not on maps. But this is not to say that the habits of Orientalism are not still with us, as any Asian can point out. Our Orientalism is remarkable only for its fidelity to the ideas of centuries past: Japanese society is “vertical,” while in the West social relations are “horizontal”; Westerners like competition, the Japanese compromise. When an earthquake struck Kobe in 1995 an American correspondent described the city as “an antipodean New York with more sushi.” Asians stoically accept natural calamities as part of the timeless order of things, he explained, so that “the Japanese of Kobe are ideal disaster victims.”
There was one peculiar aspect of Wilde’s idea of Orientalism. He observed that the image of Japan abroad in the last century was partly a concoction of the Japanese themselves. Wilde called the Japanese “the deliberate self-conscious creation” of artists such as Hokusai, whose woodblock prints were much the fashion at the height of Europe’s japonisme. This was exceptionally astute. We could easily make the same assertion about many of Japan’s leaders and thinkers throughout history. “Japan” has long been an act of the imagination among the Japanese, too, and to call some Japanese Orientalists is to stretch the term but slightly.
~~Japan: A Reinterpretation -by- Patrick Smith
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