Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific By Nao ...

As Stuart Hall argued, identity should be considered “a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (“Cultural Identity” 21). The literary and non-literary texts on the Pacific that are used in this book can be regarded as the spaces where identities were constantly produced and reproduced through colonial and postcolonial negotiations of creolizations, assimilations, and syncretisms. Furthermore, in such identities-in-process where “self” and “other” are “[n]either all the same nor entirely different,” both the imperialist clichés (or Orientalisms) and the resistive attempts against them are intermingled (Hall, “Ethnicity” 349). The following chapters present incomplete, unstable, and fluid—“oceanic”—decolonizations produced from vantage points of the colonizer colonized, diasporic returnees, emigrants, and hybrids.

This book's attempt is not isolated. One of the most impressive attempts at geographical, historical, and cultural reflection of Japan by turning southwards (or to the Pacific Islands) is Japanese novelist Shimao Toshio's view of Japan as “Yaponeshia” (Japonesia), or the Japanese Archipelago consisting of three island arcs— the Kurils, the mainland (four main islands), and the Ryukyus (upon which his work focuses). Recently, cultural anthropologist Imafuku Ryuta incorporated and developed this idea into his vision of “Archipel-Monde” (the world as archipelagoes), mainly reviewing Euro-American, South American, and Caribbean literatures.

The following chapters examine Japanese representations of the south island (i.e., abstract images instead of specific islands) in the colonial period between the First and Second World Wars (chapter 1) and their postwar and postmodern phase, especially by envisaging Godzilla movies and Ikezawa Natsuki's novels on Micronesia (chapter 2); Nakajima Atsushi's and Albert