East asian images of Japan: An overview

Written in 1937, these lines seem prescient in the early twenty-first century. ‘Fostered views’ of Japan in both China and Korea fuel tensions that have repeatedly surfaced; for example, in 2010 and 2012, in disputes over uninhabited islands in the seas separating these countries. The scope for compromise by governments over these disputes is constrained by popular nationalisms based, at least in part, on caricatured portrayals of foreign neighbours. To fully understand such tensions, their causes and implications, would require analysis of the other side of the equation - the ‘hostile attitudes and dangerous concepts’, as well as the ‘social facts’, operative within Japan itself. However, the purpose of this volume is not to analyse Japanese foreign relations, though our findings have relevance for that task. Rather, we analyse the portrayal of Japan in the societies of East and Southeast Asia, how and why this has changed in recent decades, and what these changing images of Japan reveal about the ways in which these societies construct their own identities. Our focus is on the role played by Japan, as an ‘Other’, in the construction of national ‘selves’ across the East Asian region, with reference to the views ‘fostered’ through a broad range of media ranging from school curricula and textbooks to film and comics.