On January 12, 2023, the Global Asia Research Center, Waseda University, hosted a workshop entitled “Emplotting the Japanese Empire: Border-Crossing and Cosmopolitanism” presented by Jordan Sand, Professor of Japanese History at Georgetown University. This lecture was the second lecture of his lecture series.
The presentation began with an introduction to the book “Metahistory” (1973) by Hayden White. Professor Sand discussed Hayden White’s four modes of emplotment, which are Romance, Satire, Comedy, and Tragedy. Professor Sand analyzed “Peculiarities of the Japanese Empire” as subaltern imperialism, imported modernity, an existing Chinese cultural ecumene, and pan-Asianism and these things have created the space for a spectrum of cosmopolitan ideas to emerge within East Asia and ideas that were distinct from the cosmopolitanism of the post-Enlightenment European empires.
Professor Sand quoted and discussed Four Colonial Cosmopolitanisms, as follows:
- The elite internationalist (Nitobe Inazō, ~1915)
- The anti-imperialist subaltern in the metropole (Yi Kwangsu, 1919)
- The subaltern globalist (Yamaguchi Koshizu, 1923, Lian Wenqing, 1924)
- The savage as a mirror (Taimo Miseru, 1895, Kon Wajirō, 1925)
By these quotations, Professor Sand concluded that moments in which the colonial encounter, or the space of colonial encounter, induced a new awareness of the relationship between self and other, a step beyond the boundaries of existing ethnic identities or a rethinking of those boundaries, and therefore a form of “transcendence” of the conditions of colonialism themselves.
End of the report