ABSTRACT
Shiguehiko Hasumi, a distinguished film and literary critic and Professor Emeritus and former President of the University of Tokyo, was one of the key figures who helped introduce Foucault to the Japanese public. His interview with Foucault, conducted in Paris in October 1977, opens The Japan Lectures. In 1970, Foucault had made an earlier trip to Japan and, shortly after, Hasumi published an interview with him, in which, as later in 1977, the focus was on Foucault's relations with Marx and Marxism; he also attended a lecture on Manet that Foucault gave in Japan, which would give him pause. A participant, sometimes a witness, with his own ongoing role as a cinema and literary critic and a university professor, Hasumi thus had a peculiar vantage point on this long-forgotten moment in Foucault's itinerary, which The Japan Lectures now serve to re-open.
