The Imagined East Asian Community: Japan's Ajia and Kindai Narratives

• Main Authors: Chen, Hung Ta, 陳泓達
• Other Authors: Li, Ying Ming
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/71057614036159097765

博士 === 國立政治大學 === 東亞研究所 === 96 === Modern Japan regards "Ajia" as an imagined community, and exhibits in the political, economic, cultural and epistemic aspects, commits Japan's nationalist narrative of self-orientation accordingly, and shapes her foreign policy and strategic objectives . In modern Japan, "Ajia" was once a negative term by indicating stagnant, laggard, but in the 1980s, as Japan's economy has been developing rapidly and regionalism gaining popularity, the "East Asia" (Tōa) instead became the symbol of heightening her superiority with its cultural implications, this dissertation is trying to reveal the identity politics reflected by such Asianism discourses. This dissertation assumes that Japan's "East Asia" imagination derived from the following triplet structure that is civilization discourse of resisting the hegemony of Chinese and Western imperialism; "pre-modern" Sino-Barbarian (Hua-Yi) tributary system; and reflection to Western modernity knowledge construction, reconstructing the East Asian modernity for dialogue space. Under the triplet structure, there were three kinds of mode of being in modern Japan: resistance, embeddedness and representation, each had been highlighted under different conditions, but the problematic manifested as one, that is the "East Asia" was a "constructed reality" corresponded to the "Europe" or "the West" with different characteristics, constituted the perceptive understructure of Japan's unique development road, and illustrated in self-identity writing context, underlined the collective anxiety of her knowledge community when faced with "the others". As a result, "East Asia" implied its different significances at different stages, and been given different political tasks, during which the change must be understood from the "East Asia" relative to Japan’s context of modernization. After articulation of knowledge, the spatial "Ajia" and temporal "Kindai" which depicted the Eurocentric modernity, converged on Japan’s "community" imagination that swung between the East and West, self and the others, regional and global identity landmarks. The implication of resistance aimed at self-representation, as alienated embeddedness justified the legitimacy of resistance, and representation returned to the field of embeddedness discourse eventually.