Rethinking Japanese Studies

Kaori Okano is Professor in Asian Studies/Japanese at La Trobe University, and the President of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia (2015–7). Yoshio Sugimoto is Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University.

'These chapters contain a key to understand not simply how to make Japanese Studies relevant to a world in which Japan may seem passé, but also how area studies might enable a transcendence of the constraints of Eurocentrism and provincial Anglo-American standards of academic judgment.'Gordon Mathews, Professor of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Review in Social Science Japan, DOI: 10.1093/ssjj/jyy011'Nonetheless,the book makes noteworthy contributions and contains some intriguing findings. It explores the origins, impact, and emerging alternatives to Eurocentrism in Japanese studies, largely within the Asia-Pacific region. Contributors also touch on issues of global knowledge production, the international stratification of academia, and Asia-Pacific scholarship, thus reaching beyond a narrow focus of Japanese studies within the Asia Pacific.'W. Lawrence Neuman, Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, USA. Review in Pacific Affairs: https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/book-reviews/rethinking-japanese-studies-eurocentrism-and-the-asia-pacific-region-edited-by-kaori-okano-and-yoshio-sugimoto/‘Altogether, this volume offers a compelling, insightful, and often provocative array of perspectives on Japanese Studies in the contemporary Asia-Pacific region. The questions presented by each chapter in particular, and the entire volume in general, are pertinent to the Japanese Studies field as a whole, and to the field of Area Studies at large.’Rotem Kowner, Professor of Asian Studies, University of Haifa, Israel. Review in Japanese Studies, DOI: 10.1080/10371397.2018.1546117'This valuable anthology invites us to refl ect on the continuing reality that Japan studies globally has been dominated by Anglophone scholarship, with key publications in English—and with the West often serving as the primary point of comparison. It offers a window into the fi eld of Japan studies in South Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Japan itself and showcases collaborative research projects that study ransnational interplay among East Asian nations. [...] The critical framework embraced in the introductory and concluding essays by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto draws from post–cold war and postcolonial reflections on U.S. global hegemony and the postcolonial critique of Eurocentric narratives of modernity'Amy Borovoy, Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University, USA. Review in The Journal of Japanese Studies, DOI: 10.1353/jjs.2019.0039

• List of figures and tablesList of contributorsAcknowledgementsChapter 1 Rethinking ‘Eurocentrism’ and Area Studies: Japanese Studies in the Asia-Pacific Chapter 2 Studying Japan as the ‘Other’: A Short History of Japanese Studies and Its Future Chapter 3 Japanese Language Research: Kokugo as an Ideology, Nihongo as an Autonomous Global Scholarship? Chapter 4 From ‘National’ Literature to Multicultural Literature in ‘Japanese’ Language? Chapter 5 Development of Japanese Studies with a Southeast-Asian Perspective Chapter 6 Japanese Studies in South Korea Chapter 7 Australia’s View of Japan, as Seen from Japanese Studies Chapter 8 Transnational Dialogues on Historical Issues Concerning East Asia: Collaborative Project to Write History Textbooks [China, Japan and South Korea] Chapter 9 Whispering, Writing and Working across Borders: Practising Transnational History in East Asia Chapter 10 Turning toward a Cosmopolitan Japanese Studies BibliographyIndex