When Edward Said sent shock waves through the academic world by adding “-ize” to the word “Oriental,” writers and scholars everywhere were forced for the first time to think long and hard about the way they represent “the other” (i.e., non-Westerners). No one wanted to be branded with the new label of “Orientalist.” But what Said failed to identify in his study (in his defense, it was beyond the scope of what he set out to do) was Orientalism’s mirror phenomenon, Occidentalism: the East’s construction(s) of the West and, by extension, itself.

With the discovery of this new phenomenon, critics of Said were free again to voice their objections to his ideas — why worry about being called an Orientalist, they asked, when Orientals have been orientalizing themselves all along? As recent scholarship has shown, many of the stereotypes Said viewed as creations of the Western imperial imagination seem to have been, in fact, jointly created. Alastair Bonnett takes it one step further in his The Idea of the West: Politics, Culture and History (2004) and argues that the notions of both “East” and “West” may largely have been inventions of non-Westerners themselves. The case of writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (谷崎潤一郎) (1886-1965) can be seen as further evidence in support of Bonnett’s argument. Tanizaki’s famous essay “In Praise of Shadows” 「陰翳礼讃」 (1933; translated by Edward Seidensticker in 1977) is an excellent example of Tanizaki performing, and ultimately subverting, the two major East-West discourses.

Before I address Tanizaki’s essay, let me first identify the two major East-West discourses of the day. The first saw Asia as inherently inferior, backward, and existing outside human history, while the West was seen as a beacon of light at history’s center. This mode of discourse was exemplified by Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤諭吉 (1835-1901), who promoted a Western-style nationalist agenda that sought to position Japan toward the West and away from Asia and its negative stereotypes. Fukuzawa’s ultimate goal was not to imitate and join the West for its own sake, however, but rather to become independent and autonomous from it. The only way this was possible, he argued, was through the creation of a modern nation-state.

Fukuzawa helped create and propagate many of the Orientalist stereotypes about the East, as evidenced by his many disparaging remarks about Asian, and particularly, Japanese culture, which he saw as backward, passive, and weak. He was especially critical of the Chinese influence on Japanese culture, which he held as responsible for Japan’s low international status at the time. He saw a “static and passive” China to be representative of Asia as a whole and urged Japan to move away from the lagging East in order to fulfill its “new destiny.” In his essay “Good-bye Asia” 「脱亜論」 (1885), he urges the Japanese to shed their passive “Asiatic” traits and abandon “our bad [Asian] friends,” so that they may advance through the creation of a modern, Westernized nation-state.

Although a fervent nationalist, Fukuzawa ended up “deploy[ing] a form of Orientalism in which Asia [was] cast as a separate and primitive realm, to be distinguished from both the West and their own nations. […] Rather than importing or translating a ready-made idea of the West, Fukuzawa actively fashioned a certain representation of the West to suit his own (and, in large measure, his social class’) particular political ambitions” (Bonnett, 70). Again, the driving factor behind Fukuzawa’s push to westernize was the desire to stave off subjugation. In this sense, like Tanizaki in “In Praise of Shadows,” Fukuzawa can be seen as consciously manipulating East-West representations for particular ends.
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