REL 256(S) Inventing Japan: Religion, Power, and Cultural Identity*

The course presents a history of the concept of Japan and Japanese identity from the perspective of religious and intellectual history. Since the early centuries of the common era the Chinese have given descriptions of the people and the culture of the Japanese archipelago. The first European to provide a description of Japan (Cipangu) was Marco Polo in the thirteenth century. The Venetian was followed by countless travelers, missionaries, colonialists, businessmen, artists, and dreamers from all over the world. Most of them described the land and the people as radically other, a sort of upside-down world, and it is astonishing to discover that a large part of current media treatment of contemporary Japan, not just in the West but in Japan and in Asia as well, is a direct result of such older exotic visions and tales of otherness. What is often missing from the picture is, importantly, the voice of the Japanese talking about themselves. The course deals with the ways in which the Japanese participated and are participating in this process of formation of their cultural identity. We will see that Japanese cultural identity is the result of interactions and problematic confrontations with foreigners and outsiders, and vice versa. In the course we study foreigners' descriptions of Japan together with several Japanese documents concerning their own cultural identity. An important characteristic of Japanese nativist discourse, especially until 1945, is its reliance upon religious concepts, such as the divine origin and sacrality of Japan, the agency of the deities, and the participation of the Japanese in a sort of sacred ordering of reality. We will see that Shintoism, usually considered as the original form of Japanese religiosity, has played an important role in such a nativist discourse. The final part of the course will deal with contemporary forms of nativism and with poststructuralist and postmodernist alternatives. Requirements: full attendance and participation, brief critical comments on weekly assignments, two 5- to 7-page essays, and a final paper. Lecture and discussion. Open to all classes without prerequisite.

Hour:  RAMBELLI