Further, and paradoxically, Western discourse about the inherent difference
of the Japanese, which utilised adjectives such as ‘inscrutable’, ‘exotic’,
‘anti-individualistic’, provided a mechanism through which Japan would
redefine itself. Iwabuchi labels as self-orientalism the process by which Japan
defined itself in terms of existing definitions on the part of the West (1994).
In Orientalism, Said defined Orientalism as ‘an exercise of cultural strength’
in which the West determined ‘that the Orient and everything in it was, if
not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West’ (2003:
40–1). An example of this approach can be found in Ruth Benedict’s book,
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946), based
upon interviews with prisoners of war in Allied camps; in fact, Benedict never
visited Japan, instead basing her conclusions solely on interviews with Japanese
immigrants and extant written materials. These conclusions constructed Japan
as a ‘shame’ culture in opposition to the ‘guilt’ culture of Western societies,
and through the processes of Orientalism and self-Orientalism (or complicit
Orientalism), became a mechanism through which to distinguish Japan from
the West, and indeed the West from Japan. As such, the search for what was
distinctive about Japanese society operated within pre-existing Orientalist
assumptions about Japan and the Japanese rather than differing from them.
The idea of the community as fundamental to the ie system of kinship, was
situated in opposition to the traits of an imaginary America associated with
rampant individualism, selfishness and commodity fetishisation. Iwabuchi
writes