Mirrors of the Other: ‘Why are you asking these questions?’

Abstract

Images of Japan that aim to capture what is culturally-specific about its people have a peculiarly reflexive quality, for such images are themselves structured by the attempt of an outsider to focus somewhere else, ‘other’. ‘Japan’ then functions as a marker of the difference between inside and outside ‘our’ culture, surreptitiously defining and confirming the development and identity of the Western observer. A Western reader therefore needs to reflect on their own position and historically locate their own assumptions about culture and about the Japanese, and also to examine how they — in that ‘other’ culture — employ images of themselves which supply certain kinds of mirror for the West. The processes of incorporation and juxtaposition of contradictory concepts of self enabled certain kinds of psychoanalytic conceptual framework to appear in Japan which also necessarily attend to contradiction as such. That conceptual framework cues us into narratives of the self that tend to confirm commonsensical representations of subjectivity in the West, and it provides a vantage point from which to question dominant narratives about the nature of the unconscious in global culture. Then we can redraw the map in which Japan appears at the margins of psychoanalysis, to show how the questions it tackles have now come to operate at the centre of reflexive critical practices tackling contemporary subjectivity.