The Cultural Paradox of Modern Japan: Japan and Its Three Others

This paper will examine the cultural paradox of modern Japan, focusing on the views of civilization and Otherness during the period of the Great Japanese Empire (1868-1945). I will look at modern Japanese views of civilization and how these views reflected modern Japan’s perceptions of its major Others: the West, China and the South Seas.2 The reason I write in terms of the “paradox” of modern Japan is because the Japan of this period, as the only non-Western, non-Caucasian country to have “succeeded” in modernizing and moving down the path of imperialism, experienced problems that many other countries did not.3 What does the Great Japanese Empire share with other (Western) empires in terms of historical experience? What were the differences? As was the case in other empires, the people of the Great Japanese Empire were prejudiced against the peoples of their colonies – although different empires had different forms of prejudice and, even within a single empire, the prejudices different peoples faced could differ. Following Edward Said, this prejudiced view is sometimes labelled “Japanese Orientalism”.4 As depicted