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Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. By MARILYN IVY. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. xi, 270 pp. $17.95.
What strategies should students of Japan use in order to approach the subject of late-twentieth-century "Japan," "Japan" which appears transnational with multiple border crossings and yet still reinscribes its distinction from the "West"? Should we insist on the uniqueness of Japan, reproducing the discourse of Japan's cultural selfobsession? Should we rely on the distinction between the economic and the cultural in order to explain this uniqueness? Should we insist on the divide between Japan and the West, even though Japan has always already been implicated in the ubiquitous West since the mid-nineteenth century? In this intellectually path-breaking book, Marilyn Ivy rejects all these strategies (chapter 1). Instead, she introduces us to another far more productive one in order to come to grips with the subject of Japan. Such a strategy necessarily implies a critique of the anthropology (and many other disciplines) of Japan, which have relied on notions of organization, structure, and "typical" Japanese, and a single collective noun, the "Japanese."
Ivy focuses on what she calls "the vanishing" and the way it is recuperated by cultural industries and institutions in the landscape of Japanese capitalist modernity. The vanishing, which is gone but not quite in...