Japan absolutely was the aggressor and absolutely committed attrocites. However, nothing is as simple as what people usually believe. The politics in Asia prior to WWII were very complicated. It is rediculous for anyone to think that the U.S. and other Western nations were just innocently sittting there and Japan decided to attack them starting with Pearl Harbor. Of course there was no good excuse for Pearl Harbor but let’s be real here. The Western powers were putting more and more pressure on Japan and the U.S., England and others also had their interests in China. Japan felt liek they were being constricted and this was threatening their economy and nation.

The rest of the world sees Japan during WWII as the terrorist aggressor nation but it is more complicated then that.

Don’t missunderstand me though. Do I think that Japan deserved to be confroneted and defeated by the U.S? Of course. But the bombing of Japanese cities was wrong and the perpective of Japan before WWII has to be taken into account.

Not because I am married to a Mongolian and still learning the language from her,but I believe there is certain advantage of knowing another country through your in-laws and that would give you some inside view of the society.I am experiencing this with Mongolia.

Before 1994,Mongolia was a socialist republic and few foreigners could go out side of capitol.Marriage to the locals were nearly impossible for people from the west(That includes Japan too,Bender!).
So eventually almost all the Mongologist outside of Mongolia were either linguist nor area specialist mostly serving as cold war era Sino-Soviet relation watcher.
These people have very limited way to access to the social reality of Mongolia.One is by reading and the other is contacting academic and that made their analysis of the Mongolian society is somewhat out of touch with popular feeling.

Now this is indeed an extreme case,but certain elements could be universal,for I feel the same about some of the Japanologist who is not married to Japanese nationals.(especially Chalmers Johnson)

James A:
Buruma did write “The Occidetalism” with Israeli academic Avishai Margalit(it is also translated in Japanese).The book was basically “the west VS the rest”theme book.Putting Kamikaze pilot,Muslim Brotherhood,Nazi Germany and the Bolsheviks all into one as the enemy of the west based on similar anti-west sentiment.I always feel Palestinians suicide bomber has more acceptable cause compare to Kamikazes so I thought that was not fair comparisonment…..

I had an occasion to speak with a Japanese woman who is working as trasnlator. She told me exactly the same thing. Buruma insited that all the conversation(meetings included) should be conducted in English.

She said when she and other Japanese staff used Japanese then Buruma got quite angry.

She said that Buruma and Wolfren both couldn’t speak Japanese well.

James A: I think “Occidentalism” is correct. Recently Buruma has published a book with this title.

I have read it and found it also not original. Soon after Said has published “Orientalism” , in anthropological circle at least, such kind of discussion about “occidentalism” and critics against Said emerged.

One of the classics is James Carrier’s book published under the same title in 1995.

from amazon
“Occidentalism is an investigation of images of Western cultural identity. Edward Said’s Orientalism revolutionized Western understanding of non-Western cultures by showing how Western projected images shaped the Occidental view of the Orient, but those who follow Said have not until now reflected that understanding back onto Western societies. Occidentalism shows how images of the West shape people’s conceptions of themselves and others, and how these images are in turn shaped by members of Western and non-Western societies alike. The contributors describe and explicate these images in a variety of areas, from Western academic writing to popular Western culture, from societies within and outside the West, to show how power and conflict shape such conceptions. ”

How such kind of “occidentalism” shaped the world view of Islamic terrorists is, as I understand it, also a hot topic among current anthropology.

Buruma just synthesized what was discussed in academic circles.

I’m not too big a fan of Buruma as well. He’s definately a writer who appeals more to typical Western attitudes on Japan and the East. One of the only English-language writers on Japan I’ve been impressed with is Donald Richie.

Years ago, when I first started translating, I applied for a freelance position with a translation company in Japan. They asked me (after I took their trial) whether I could read Japanese.

I thought that was a weird question, and I wondered what kind of translation company would ask it, so I asked them to explain.

They told me there were native-English speaking translators who couldn’t read kanji and had their Japanese wives put everything into hiragana for them first.

As I said, I know nothing of Buruma, but there are several possible explanations for this situation…

Garrett: That comment you cite by Darrow reminds me of an idea in some circles that human beings have a tendency to want to quickly pass on information that they have acquired, regardless of whether the information is relevant, important, or even needs to be conveyed. The people in those circles refer to that tendency as “unloading”. Once you become aware of the idea of unloading, you start to notice it more frequently in all sorts of situations.

Anyway,I agree with Tomo that there are stereotypes in the book especially in it’s Germany/Japan comparison and his writings has huge orientalism taste,But then again Buruma’s hostility toward Edward Said is well known(the guy even co-authored a book called “The Occidentalism”!)and those factors are inevitable for a western authors writing about Japan for non-Japanese readers.

I definitely agree, Ampontan, that the comments there were somewhat depressing, not least because they weren’t Japan Today-type crap, but comments made by people who, by virtue of their subscribing to TNR, could at least be considered a politically-aware group. Those are people who, generally speaking, are toward the high end of the educational and income spectrum. People who ought to know better.

What disturbs me is that they’re all missing the point of the issue, which has to do with present-day Japanese politics. They’ve shifted the focus to WWII, which would be OK, but that they’ve missed the ancillary point as well, which is the legacy of that attack.

What is in TNR’s comment section, instead, is a lot of faux-intelligence – the parroting of tangentially-related historical trivia, rather than any kind of insight or intelligent commentary.

Take the last comment there (at the moment), number 41, by a guy calling himself “Darrow,” presumably in reference to Clarence Darrow. Pretty far from it if this is what he contributes:

It should not be forgotten that unlike the imploded Third Reich, the Imperial Japanese Empire was still a barbaric presence in Indochina, Indonesia, Korea, China and elsewhere in the spring/summer of 1945. These lands collectively suffered hundreds of thousands of causalities every month. Japan itself suffered terrible famine in the winter of 1945-46, even with huge mitigation championed my MacArthur. The war needed to end.

Not stupid, really, but entirely irrelevant.

On another note, I’m kind of with Tomojiro on Buruma, but I have a question: How much Japanese does Buruma actually read or understand?
An acquaintance of mine, who’s a freelance cameraman, was hired to help shoot a documentary in which Buruma was interviewed. This guy said that Buruma insisted on being interviewed only in English, didn’t seem to understand what was said to him in Japanese, and got angry when the reporter asked him a question in Japanese.
I wasn’t there and have never met Buruma, so I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but it would be kind of a damning anecdote for an historian studying Japan.

Interesting. I found it very stereotypic and not that original.

Well,now there is a paperback version of the Japanese translation, maybe I should give it a chance and reread it.