Introduction

Two questions are driving this book. The first is theoretical: how do processes come to form, perform and transform specific collective political subjects over time? The second is empirical: how has the West historically been central in the diverse articulations of a Japanese collective identity in light of the multicultural problématique1 in Japan? As these two questions suggest, two central puzzles are structuring this book. First, a puzzle that will only be hinted at in the text is with the tension present not only in the discipline of International Relations (IR)2 but also in political/social sciences more generally. In IR, more particularly, I have often been struck with the instrumental use of history to sustain a theory even though “facts” tell us otherwise, the most blatant example being the end of the Cold War and its place in the ways in which IR came (not) to “evolve” as a discipline. How should we deal with a complex empirical material without imposing on it our a priori/ Western conceptualizations? How to conceptualize the social world in a way that does not squeeze the empirical world into our theoretical molds? In a sense, how to make theory and the empirical world dialogue? The second puzzle needs a little unpacking. It is centered on how identity,

alterity and the international are conceptualized in IR and informs the book’s theoretical engagement with these conceptualizations. IR has traditionally theorized and customarily understood its field of study as the actions of a state outside its sovereign boundaries. These actions have been framed by most IR scholars according to a canonical view about international relations as taking place among states in a state of anarchy. This particular setting led the discipline to perceive its problématiques as either the nexus between war and peace, if one took the pessimistic and tragic path of the international, or the nexus between conflict and cooperation, if one took the more optimistic path. These nexuses have been at the heart of a discipline for the past eighty years and have their own merits providing fundamental heuristics for explaining or understanding international relations. Over the past thirty years, however, many scholars have systematically questioned the hegemony of these nexuses by questioning both their pretension at exhaustively encompassing the field of study of the international and their ability to account for the actual richness and complexity of the international.