Conclusion

While ‘Japan-bashing’ remains a feature of contemporary Western and Japanese discourses about Japan, its years of greatest influence were in the late twentieth century, when it revealed much about the dominant national and international themes of that period. For many Western observers, this period was a time of uncertainty and anxiety about how to identify new and overarching frameworks for international relations generally, and for approaching Japan specifically. Since World War II, Western relations with Japan had been almost exclusively articulated in terms of the geo-political and ideological confrontation between the West and the Communist world, particularly by American commentators who viewed Japan as a potential or actual bastion against Communism. The eventual decline of the Soviet Union, the main focus of Western concern about Communism, thus necessitated not the identification of a new enemy, but certainly a new framework for understanding and dealing with Japan. However, the search for this new framework produced different, typically competing, paradigms for interpreting Japan. It was in this ambiguous stage, when the world had been ‘cut loose’ from ‘cold war moorings’, one analysis argued, that a distinct and specific evolution in Western discourses on Japan occurred, in the process producing the practice of ‘Japan-bashing’. ¹