Japan

Abstract

Scholarship on contemporary France-Japan relations are usually incidental and framed within Europe’s economic relations with Japan or vice versa (Bridges 1992, 1999; Sautter 1996; Lowe 2000; Iwanaga 2000). Very few books or detailed studies have been dedicated to France-Japan relations per se (Matsuura 1998). This chapter would argue that the two predominant themes in Paris' relations with Tokyo are fascination and suspicion. The fascination for Japan, led by French writers and painters such as Baudelaire, Loti, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec, was confined primarily to exoticising Japan for its art and culture. It is evident in the century-long French love affair with japonisme (the movement of Japanese influences in Western art), which heavily permeated Impressionism and Art Nouveau from the second half of the 19th century (French Government, Ministère de la Culture 1988:16–32.) French cultural luminaries popularized japonaiserie, the European craze at the turn of the twentieth century for Japanese objets d'art, propagating an “exotic- aesthetic” image of and fascination for Japan (Wilkinson 1983; Little- wood 1996; Matsuura 1998). On the flip side of this aesthetic image of Japan is an abiding fear and suspicion of Japan's political, military and economic ambitions. This has its roots in Japan's spectacular modernization and successes in the military field (defeat of China in 1895, Russia in 1905, over-running French Indochina in 1940 before all the European colonies in Southeast Asia in World War II) as well as its economic superpower status by the 1970s.