The Origins of Occidentalism

Ian Buruma has a great piece about "occidentalism"--vilification of the West--in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He traces both the Western and non-Western sources and recovers what transpired at a 1942 conference in Japan:

What, then, is the Occidentalist idea of the West?

That is the problem that vexed a group of prominent Japanese intellectuals who gathered for a conference in Kyoto in 1942. The attack on Pearl Harbor was not the ostensible reason for the conference, but the underlying idea was to find an ideological justification for Japan's mission to smash, and in effect replace, the Western empires in Asia. The topic of discussion was "how to overcome the modern." Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism.

Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. The "modern thing," said another, was a "European thing." Others believed that "Americanism" was the enemy, and that Japan should make common cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World (there would certainly have been takers in Europe). There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom and democracy. These had to be "overcome."

All agreed that culture -- that is, traditional Japanese culture -- was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to produce mongrel races. A holistic, traditional Orient united under divine Japanese imperial rule would restore the warm organic Asian community to spiritual health. As one of the participants put it, the struggle was between Japanese blood and Western intellect.

Well worth reading in full.

Back in late 2001, as the ruins of the World Trade center still smoldered, Reason's Charles Paul Freund looked at precisely the same phenomena in "2001 Nights: The end of the orientalist critique."

Comments

[Pavel]

This article blatantly lumps together different critiques of different parts of western society and ends up not doing any of them justice.

There's two sides to every "us and them" mentality. Not everyone with a criticism of American democracy and global capitalism is a nationalist xenophobe. Not everyone who thinks that Zionism is a generally racist movement with a shameful history is an anti-semite.

This article reads a bit too much like a conservative tract on the liberal-prodrug-homosexual-antifamily-communist menace.

Maybe I'm exaggerating. It does make some good comparisons. At the same time, it serves more to simplify than highlight the finer points of the things it attempts to compare.

[Jason Ligon]

Probably not everyone discussing the problem with Westernization thinks all of it is bad, either. I think the point is that we accept the generally idiotic term Westernization without the same criticism we have for its mirror image.

The concept is fundamentally racist, on both sides. Anti western sentiment is not sold as a principled refutation to individual liberty and markets, it is sold as a package that includes colonialism, empire, and cultural destruction. The connections between makets and what empire has historically meant are so thin as to be non existent, but the connection is made so as to satisfy someone's idea of what the Bad Guy Westerner should look like.

[joe]

After reading some Said and Wole Soyinka plays in college, I wrote a paper on "Occidentalism." My conclusion was that orientalism involved greater distortions, because colonialists could afford to misunderstand the people they had power over, but the colonized had better understand their rulers pretty well.

But the issue of the Japanese complicates things, because they seem to be one of the only non-Western cultures not to have their relationship with the west founded on political and military subjugation.

[Jean Bart]

Well, the first question one would have to ask is whether orientalism is the same thing as "occidentalism." I think a connect between the two terms is attempted here, but not in any concrete way. Furthermore, Said (the so-called father of Orientalism) hardly consistently vilified the West (indeed, he had fulsome praise for Western writers - see his introduction to the Oxford edition of Kipling's "Kim").

[joe]

There is a world of difference between the Perry events and colonialism. Not just a quantitative difference, but a qualitative one, too. Japan was never plundered, and the lives of its people were never re-ordered for foreigners. The re-ordering that occurred was done by the Japanese themselves.

And I am certainly not asserting that Japan was benign, just that its relationship with the West followed different patterns.

[Jean Bart]

joe,

Actually, early on they did (see Adm. Perry); they simply exclaimed "Fuck you!" and adopted from the West what they found worthy, etc. Anyway, Japanese actions in WWII hardly argues for any benigness on their part; they are only just slightly worse than the Nazis and the Soviets during the 1930s and 1940s. I think its an indication that rapacious imperialism is hardly a Western-only preserve (see China in Tibet for example).