Abstract
As Roland Barthes's epoch-making essay Empire of Signs suggests, in a slightly orientalist tone itself, modern japanese culture is a fascinating kaleidoscope of Eastern and Western cultures, but at the same time a strong purism is inherent in its aestheticized nationalism. In this essay, I offer a comparative literary analysis of select travel writings that emerge out of Japanese-European encounters in the Meiji era (1868–1912) to show the cultural dynamism of the time, after the Edo period (1603–1852), when Japan first opened its borders to the West. My analysis of Japan of that time as an Eastern-Western contact zone is based on Homi Bhabha's notion of cultural hybridity and Mary Louise Pratt's understanding of a cultural encounter in an asymmetrical power constellation. Japan has never been a colony, escaping Western imperialism through the (sakoku; “closed country”) policy of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who banned all Christian missionaries and Western foreigners from the insular empire. In the Meiji modernization in 1868, the old samurai elites imported select reforms from Western Europe, notably from England, France, and Germany, to Japan. This is why Yōichi Komori claimed that Japan is a “self-colonized” ( ) culture (Posutokoroniaru 8). Through the Meiji elite's adoption of certain modern ways from Germany, France, England, and the United States, an “imitative modernity” came into being.