Engaging the Other: 'Japan' and Its Alter-Egos, 1550-1850: (65 Brill's Japanese Studies Library)

In Engaging the Other: “Japan and Its Alter-Egos”, 1550-1850 Ronald P. Toby examines new discourses of identity and difference in early modern Japan, a discourse catalyzed by the “Iberian irruption,” the appearance of Portuguese and other new, radical others in the sixteenth century. The encounter with peoples and countries unimagined in earlier discourse provoked an identity crisis, a paradigm shift from a view of the world as comprising only “three countries” (sangoku), i.e., Japan, China and India, to a world of “myriad countries” (bankoku) and peoples. In order to understand the new radical alterities, the Japanese were forced to establish new parameters of difference from familiar, proximate others, i.e., China, Korea and Ryukyu. Toby examines their articulation in literature, visual and performing arts, law, and customs.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements A Word about Language List of Figures Introduction: Between Engagement and Imagination 1 Interlude: A Pair of Parables 2 Mapping the Margins: The Ragged Edges of State and Nation  1 Mapping Japan  2 Where Was Early-Modern “Japan?”  3 Reprise  4 Taxonomic Boundaries  5 Nishikawa Joken’s “Japan”  6 Terajima Ryōan and the Wakan sansai zue  7 Hayashi Shihei and the “Three Countries”  8 Margins and Maps  9 Coda 3 Imagining and Imaging “Anthropos”  1 Imaging Difference at Home  2 Brave New World: The Panopticon of Peoples in the Myriad Realms  3 The Encyclopedic Vision: Articulate Selves and Typed Others  4 Toward a Visual Ethnography of a Myriad Lands 4 Indianizing Iberia/Performing Portugal: Responses to the Iberian Irruption  1 Implicit Others and Manifest Men of Inde  2 Setting the Stage  3 Alter Others: Koreans, Okinawans, and Chinese in the Japanese Text  4 The Invasive Other: Fear of Foreigners and the Changing Iconographic Field  5 Performative Possibilities in the Age of Encounter  6 Disengagement and Code-Switching 5 Parades of Difference/Parades of Power  1 Parade Diplomacy  2 Watching the Watchers: Intersecting Gazes in Procession and Parade  3 Edo Culture as Parade  4 Alien Parades  5 The Internal Structure of an “Alien Parade”  6 A Documentary Painting is Not a Sketch  7 Parade in Review  8 How to Wrap a Parade  9 Why Wrap an Alien?  10 How to Watch a Diplomatic Parade  11 “‘Festival Chinamen’ Are More Convincing ‘Chinamen’”  12 Parade-Watching as Festival  13 The Spectator’s Condition  14 The Well-Tempered Spectator  15 Watching the Spectators  16 Seeing and Showing  17 Four Lines of Sight 6 The Birth of the Hairy Barbarian: Ethnic Slur as Cultural Marker  1 Initial Encounters and Radical Others  2 The First Hairy Barbarians  3 With a Flick of the Razor  4 Bearded Boundaries  5 Coxinga’s Pate/Chinese Bodies/Tatar Hair  6 Playing the Hairy Barbarian  7 Envisioning Hair  8 Tying Up Loose Ends 7 The Mountain That Needs No Interpreter: Mt. Fuji and the Foreign  1 National Symbols, Found and Made  2 The Rise of Mt. Fuji  3 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever: Mt. Fuji and the Ambit of the Gods  4 Universal Mt. Fuji as “Scientific” Truth  5 Mt. Fuji’s Growing Reach  6 If the Mountain Won’t Come…: Drawing the Other to Japan  7 Preserve and Protect  8 Kiyomasa Redux  9 Conclusion Epilogue: Antiphonals of Identity  1 One Costume/Many Scripts  2 Capturing “Korea” Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Ronald P. Toby, (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1977), a historian of early-modern Japan, is Professor Emeritus of History and East Asian Studies at the University of Illinois. His books include State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan (1984) and Sakoku’ to iu gaikō (2008).