ABSTRACT
I develop two narrative matrices in this chapter, shinkoku [Land of the gods/ Land protected by the gods] and kokutai [national polity essence]. I select these for their relevance to the identity/alterity nexus in Japan; it goes without saying that these narratives are not the sole ones identifiable within other problématiques, nor is the following discussion exhaustive in analyzing their uses in different historical periods. As narratives in relation to alterity, both shinkoku and kokutai are studied here in their ideational, spatial and temporal dimensions. As we will see in the next chapter, different and evolving politics of alterity emerge from these narrative matrices. The chapter starts with a standard story related to othering. The employ-
ment of the idea of shinkoku in the late sixteenth-and early seventeenthcentury Japan was related to the arrival of Christian missionaries and to the power struggles among Japanese factions after almost a century of civil war and strife. The politics of alterity thereafter deployed by the emergent Tokugawa regime in the seventeenth century left a lasting imprint on Japanese understanding of alterity. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, several social and intellectual movements in Japan created room for the emergence of a second narrative matrix. Kokutai came to be one of the defining concepts for articulating specific politics of alterity in nineteenth-and twentieth century Japan. What ultimately is of interest to us, and will be developed in the next chapter, is how kokutai came, at times, to inform politics of alterity where the West was both positively and negatively depicted, thus mobilizing more than just the figuration of inversion and the mechanism of othering. Instead, we focus this chapter on identifying and discussing two crucial
performative frameworks and networks. These were at the heart of several, sometimes competing, politics of alterity in regarding multiculturalism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I first present these narrative matrices in order to then to show how they informed different articulations of a Japanese national identity. I discuss the shinkoku narrative matrix as it was at the heart of an idea of an embryonic articulation of a “Japanese” collective identity during the seventeenth century onwards. The politics of alterity informed by this narrative matrix mainly addressed itself to the West.
While shinkoku offers a fairly classical account of othering, this first section enables us to set the stage for another powerful narrative matrix, kokutai. Kokutai is key in understanding the diverse forms the transactions with the West took throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second section presents the main origin of kokutai as a narrative
matrix and its key components within Aizawa Seishisai’s work. In the third section, I situate kokutai within a certain form of expression and a set of relationalities in order to show how kokutai actually informed a variety of sometimes conflicting politics of alterity (see next chapter) and was reinvested in ways that would come in conflict with Aizawa’s original and influential formulation.
