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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores potentiality of international/global Japanese studies, more specifically its possible conceptual and epistemological contributions to the contemporary debate about area studies, about the relationship between knowledge and the nation state, and about coloniality of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores potentiality of emerging scholarly field organised under the aegis of international/global Japanese studies (kokusai nihon gaku or kokusai nihon kenkyū in Japanese). Though the Japanese term 'gaku' and 'kenkyū' correspond to English suffixes (-ics / -ology) that refer to a field of knowledge and signify a systematic learning and knowledge production, international/global Japanese studies is by no means a firmly established field. The current stature of international/global Japanese studies is best described as a phenomenon, an on-going process of (re)organizing interdisciplinary knowledge production on Japan within Japan, so much so that its scope, its objective, and its methodological prevalence is still open to discussion. This on-going nature is precisely why this paper seeks to consider 'potentiality' of international/global Japanese studies. And by 'potentiality', I mean to specifically suggest possible conceptual and epistemological contributions that this new emerging scholarly enterprise may have for the contemporary debate about area studies (the humanitas-anthropos nexus), the relationship between knowledge and the nation state manifested in the institutional formation of the disciplines (the humanitas-nation nexus), and coloniality of knowledge. The focal point of this paper, therefore, is not necessarily the process of policy implementation and the development of technocratic-managerial strategies for the establishment of international/global Japanese studies programs. But it is instead those scholarly debates that attempt to articulate a perception of Japan not as an axiomatic, stable object of knowledge, but as something being materially, discursively, and imaginatively constructed through various entanglements of histories. This reconfiguration of Japan as a historical construction not only encourages us to register coloniality of knowledge manifested both in area studies and the disciplines, but also allows us to contextualise Japan in a much broader geo-historical and geo-political context of Asia, and therefore to recuperate Japan's ambiguous historical position as both coloniser and as a country subjected to the imperatives of 'Western' modernity.