ABSTRACT
Lacan It is a measure of the reduced state of the contemporary public discourse on the relations of the West with Japan that some of the most strident participants would have us believe that calling the Japanese names actually does hurt them. Or, more to the point, that the failure of scholars and commentators to write ill of Japan suggests disloyalty or the subversion of Western political and strategic interests. The only virtue in such otherwise arid pyrotechnics is that they encourage us to clarify what the term ‘criticism’ means within the Western tradition of writing about the non-Western world.
