Area studies and the disciplines: Japanese Studies and anthropology in comparative perspective

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the social and institutional dynamics by which knowledge in Japanese studies is produced in the English-using academic world, the dominant global academic system, which as such is an arbiter for much of what “we” take as research. It utilizes the case of Japanese Studies as the analytical focus because it has been the site of great changes during the past seven or so decades, is rooted in a number of (linguistic) academic communities, and has been studied by the whole variety of the social scientific disciplines. This article tackles four issues. First, it sketches out the reasons for the continued interest in and development of Japanese Studies that differ from other area studies by tackling its adaptive potential (in institutional terms). Second, by situating Japanese Studies in terms of the global production of knowledge it defines how Japanese Studies is variously seen as peripheral, marginal or provincial in terms of the Euro-American centers. Third, given the ever-increasing theoretical citation in articles published in Japanese Studies (as in other regional studies) it analyses the division of labor between the disciplines and area studies. Fourth, it examines the importance of Japanese popular culture for its growth as an outcome of wider social processes within the academic dynamics of American and British universities. This article tackles these issues in an exploratory and purposely provocative manner.

KEYWORDS:

• Japanese Studies
• area studies
• global academy
• knowledge
• social science
• anthropology

Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War the conditions for producing knowledge in the scholarly fields called “area” or “regional” studies¹ have been the focus of intense self-reflection. The closing stages of a bi-polar world and the radical intensification of ties between geographically separated places forced scholars in the social sciences and humanities of the English-using academic world to explore the nature of area studies and the boundaries between them and the disciplines.² Studies of globalization argued that regions were turning into pale copies of the global cores and that the decoupling of culture and geographical space implied that local perspectives were no longer necessary. Post-structural approaches (that began with the Orientalism debate in Middle East Studies (MES) and the subaltern intervention in South Asian Studies (SAS)) interrogated the western-centric biases at base of “universal” theories applied to various areas. We, who specialized in one or another area, found that the objects of our study were no longer coherent entities linked with specific geographic areas. Since Japan or Sweden or Nigeria are everywhere in the world, scholars began to ask about the worth of Asian, European or African studies.

These reflections were accompanied during the 1990s by reduced budgets and lack of external support for many area studies no longer seen as relevant by governments and policy tanks, economic bodies and business enterprises, and boards of directors of academic institutions (Basedau & Kollner, 2006; Dirks, 2003; Quinanola, 2011). Indeed, the 1990s was a period marked by cuts in funding and the then foreseeable demise of area studies in the United States – the global core of English-using scholarship (Kennedy, 1997; Ludden, 1997; Wallerstein, 1997).

At the same time, however, despite laments about an imminent collapse in such fields as African, Latin American or Japanese Studies (henceforth JS), area studies are not only marked by continuity but are even thriving. Indeed, look at employment notices, publications, bulletins of scholarly associations, citations in edited volumes, websites of research centers, or syllabi for introductory and advanced courses. Moreover, new journals have been established, online discussion and study groups flourish and in many places university programs are either stable or growing. Moreover, since 9/11 and the emergence of “new” kinds of threats from the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia, funding pipelines for area studies were opened once again.

Similar developments can be found within our own field of JS within the English-using world, but they take on four rather distinctive features, each of which raises questions addressed in this article. First, the laments about the imminent death of JS have been accompanied by special worries about the rise of Chinese Studies and the possibility that in the future this will dominate Asian Studies. Yet at the same time as these concerns are sounded, new programs in JS are established and other ones are enlarged (Steinhoff, 2013). In fact, one has only to witness JS associations not only in the US-based AAS (Association of Asian Studies) but those in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Australia, Southeast Asia, Canada or the European Association of Japanese Studies to be impressed with the variety and intensity of activities occurring. Or indeed look at the many journals (some electronic) now available that publish about Japan. This situation raises the question of how the continuity of JS is related to its adaptive potential (in institutional terms).

Second, for a good twenty or so years we have heard critiques of the Euro-American model of scholarship sounded by scholars based inside and outside of Japan (Mathews, 2016; Okano & Sugimoto, 2018). This move has been identified with such scholars as Hamaguchi (1985), Kent (1999), or Ryang (2004a, 2004b) who have systematically questioned the epistemological foundations of JS and sought to offer alternatives. Other works like that of Morris-Suzuki (2000) call for an anti-area studies approach that takes as its starting point a much more global view of developments. And yet another strand raises questions about the degree to which North American-based scholars can be said to dominate our field – in access to funding, setting research agendas, and determining career patterns or access to journals (Asquith, 2000a; Kuwayama, 2004; Sugimoto, 2013). These critiques and pleas for other forms of knowledge entail questions about the potential for more inputs from Japanese scholarship to the global cores and about different kinds of peripherality, marginality and provinciality that characterize JS outside of the Euro-American centers.

Third, for the past two decades one now finds ever-increasing theoretical citation in articles published in JS (as in other regional journals and books) in both the social sciences and the humanities. These quotations may take the form of analytical constructs that are deployed in regard to Japanese data or “ornamental” quotations (witness the ritual invocation of French academic greats such as Foucault, Derrida or Deleuze). In the social sciences, it seems, what is worthy of study in JS is governed by the disciplines and their emphasis on the theoretical contribution of a given study and less and less by multidisciplinarity or holistic understandings of areas. In the humanities, the concepts, theories and frameworks of cultural studies have become almost a precondition for publication and career advancement. A mundane expression of this development involves identity claims within JS where scholars categorize themselves in terms of disciplinary affiliation in the social sciences or different brands of cultural studies in the humanities. Where a discipline is not easily invoked, answers to identity claims are often framed apologetically. This set of phenomena is closely tied to the division of labor between the disciplines and area studies such as JS.

Fourth, compared to the 1980s when Japan was a rising economic power and seen as threatening the economic interests of the United States and Europe, JS has now become much less overtly politicized and presently is of course much less controversial than Latin American, Chinese or Middle East Studies. Moreover, despite the rise and entry of feminist and critical theory into JS – and the study of gender, ethnicity, race or social diversity that this has brought about – there seems to be, compared to other area studies, relatively little political mobilization or critique in the field. Rather, the rise of interest in Japanese popular culture has signaled the proliferation of a benign form of scholarly knowledge based in multiculturalism and the celebration of difference and the “other”. The questions that arise out of these circumstances have to do with the reflection and impact of wider social processes within the academic dynamics of American and British universities.

This article represents an attempt to tackle these questions in an exploratory and purposely provocative manner. I do so by looking at JS comparatively within the English-using world. Let me nonetheless offer a few words about the parameters and limitations of my text. I have chosen to focus primarily on JS and anthropology within the English-using world after WWII. I have done so not only because they are all nearest my own training and career and thus provide a store of insights against which to gauge my analysis. More importantly, I have opted for this focus first because the English-using world is the dominant academic system in the world and as such is an arbiter for much of what “we” take as research; second, because as a discipline³ anthropology is probably “the” discipline most identified with area studies (and contrasted to sociology that was historically identified with “us” at home); third, JS is my focus because it has been the site of great changes within a relatively short period and is rooted in a number of (linguistic) academic communities; and fourth, I have chosen the post-WWII era because it is during this period that area studies have been most strongly institutionalized and have rapidly transformed.

Area studies: Centers and peripheries in academic systems

Analytically, the character of JS is dependent first of all on its place in the broad scheme of the academic systems comprising the world of higher education. Many scholars – including those in JS – usually identify two levels of this system: the globally dominant one where English is used and a variety of local systems interacting to a greater or lesser degree with it. This system is then often thought of having a center, semi-centers and peripheries (Gerholm & Hannerz, 1982). A more complex picture reveals that the world is actually divided into three tiers of various overlapping linguistic academic systems, each of which is characterized by its own metropolitan centers, semi-centers and peripheries (Hamel, 2007).⁴ Below the dominant top tier of the English-using system lies the second tier, each of which is characterized by its own language of research and mode of academic production and which uses the languages of former colonial or regional empires (Eades, 2000): the prime examples are the Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Japanese or (arguably) Hindi academic communities. Finally, at the bottom is the third tier comprised of other countries with languages that have little international diffusion.

Each community, with variants, is characterized by its own academic mode of production. A prime and relevant example for our purposes is the now-changing kenkyūshitsu (research centers) model in Japan that assures tenure without “publish or perish” pressures, makes available and legitimizes in-house publications, provides more publishing opportunities earlier in careers, and has large readerships in the Japanese language (McVeigh, 2002; Poole, 2010; Teichler, 2019, pp. 245, 250). The governing issue is that of a critical mass of scholars and resources in a linguistic academic system that can assure fully-fledged careering structures and practices and allow them to be relatively disconnected or loosely coupled to the English-using system (see also Mathews, 2008). Thus, while mastery of (academic) English is a prerequisite for participating in “international scholarship”, its use may be limited if there is a very large internal academic market as in China, Japan or the Spanish-using world (Barshay, 1996; Eades, 2000). Such academic markets, unlike those characterizing “small” societies like Malaysia or Israel, often allow professional advancement without publication or participation in English-language fora.

The indicators of how English has become the dominant language of the academic world are clear. For instance, more than 75% of the articles in the social sciences and well over 90% of the articles in the natural sciences are written in English (Hamel, 2007). In addition, scientists in the semi-peripheries are users of Western science rather than contributors to its collective store of knowledge (Schott, 1998). The governing pattern is for the filtering of external ideas into second- and third-tier communities through translations of works written in the centers (almost exclusively composed in English or rarely French or German) or the holding of international conferences and seminars. One outcome of the existence of parallel – if hierarchically organized – systems is frequently scholars who become transmigrants travelling between different linguistic academic communities characterized by their own ways of producing, disseminating and consuming knowledge (Yuki Imoto, 2011, personal communication). Faure (2001; also Kato, 2014), commenting about academics in Hong Kong, explains that they lead a schizophrenic existence since they are caught between the “international” (read English-using) system and the system of the Chinese-using world. Within the contours of these worlds, mediators are important since they translate – literally or figuratively – texts published in one system into the language of another: for example, Bennet and Naga (1953) explicated the reception of Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in Japan for an American readership.

Against this background, it is important to understand that before WWII area studies was a Eurocentric story. For instance, in Europe area studies not only included the colonial interest regions but also China and India and the oldest Japanese and Chinese studies chairs were established in Leiden in the middle of the 19^th Century. After WWII, area studies became very much a US-centric story. Indeed, following Appadurai (in Burgess, 2004, p. 124) area studies can be seen as the largest institutional epistemology through which the academy in the United States has apprehended much of the world since that war. The shift between Europe and the United States represented a shift in the metropolitan centers or cores of the world system of academic knowledge. Hence, area studies such as JS have travelled across the Atlantic and their contemporary core is concentrated in the top 50 or so universities in the United States. There are differences between scholarly fields in this respect. An example is international relations, which is still very much an American discipline not only because of its sheer size (quantity of journals and publications, number of scholars) but also because it is the center for theoretical innovation and “the” case taken as a benchmark for comparison by other scholarly communities (Avdinli & Mathews, 2000; Oppermann & Spencer, 2008; Smith, 2000; Waever, 1998).

What is important in the shift to the United States is that it is groups in the dominant American academic metropolis that create criteria for professional recognition, standards for research, vocabularies for appraising career moves, and identifying relevant audiences. These criteria, in turn, are adopted by scholars at the semi-centers and then at the margins (Gerholm & Hannerz, 1982, p. 21). In addition, publishers or journal editors serve to reinforce relations between centers and peripheries that are further reproduced by cultural and academic exchanges, policies of scientific foundations, or processes of training (Gerholm & Hannerz, 1982, p. 10; Miller, 2005). The main mechanisms by which the power and location of the core are produced and reproduced have been charted out before and include problem setting and conceptualization, maintaining the hierarchy of scholarly publications, defining excellence through citation patterns, holding scientific conferences, and lastly, staffing funding schemes for research (Blagojevic & Yair, 2010). Within these cores, metropolitan scholars largely confine their attention to what goes on at home, or possibly in one or more other metropoles, while scholars at the periphery are concerned with what happens in the discipline in their own country and in one or more metropolitan anthropologies. And in the peripheries, researchers on the whole take little note of each other’s work, at least unless it is brought to their attention through metropolitan scholarship.

In these circumstances, the academic authority of knowledge produced in the centers is grounded in patterns of social authority: it is primarily scholars at the metropolitan hubs that settle disputes and establish truth. For instance, when I have looked at the patterns of citations in English-language books about Japan I have repeatedly found the theories cited to have been produced and disseminated from a few dozens of institutions in the United States and to a lesser degree in Britain. Or, to provide another example, departments in Singapore or Hong Kong (where English is the medium of teaching) consistently obtain the majority of their external academic examiners from the prestigious universities of Britain and America, an arrangement which is both an indicator of, and a practice that actualizes, center-periphery relations. Whatever interest scholars may have in problems defined as important in their societies, in order to achieve recognition from the “centers” they must formulate their findings in terms of relevant theoretical models developed in the metropoles. For example, many Asian scholars find that they often have to “de-Asianize” their findings for external audiences from the centers (Burgess, 2004; Jayasuriya, 2012; Tachimoto, 1995).

Historically, the main agents in establishing area studies have been states because legal and administrative frameworks are almost all national or as in the case of the EU mediated by states. No less important, in most cases knowledge of areas has been linked to the strategic interests of states. For instance, area studies in their present form in the American core would not have been founded after WWII without the military and the cultural and technological competition with the Soviets, as well as the economic competition with the likes of Japan and now China. Furthermore it was during the decades after WWII that the main professional area studies associations in the United States were established.

Cumings (1997) asserts that what characterized area studies in the period after WWII in the US were the “often astonishing levels of collaboration between the universities, the foundations and the intelligence arms of the US state”. His critique of area studies as politically tainted because of their relations to the United States’ post-war strategic and security interests is a sort of narrative of the “original sin” of regional studies. Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS) are an example of this kind of alliance since their origin is closely related to the Cold War and to treaties like ASEAN (Macdonald, 2004; Veric, 2019). In reality, the relationship between geopolitics and the production of knowledge is not a US singularity. For example, research about India suited the concerns of the British Empire and the tie between intellectual production and English colonial geopolitics became particularly evident with the foundation of the International Africa Institute (IAI) in 1926 (Eades, 2000). Similarly, Japanese anthropologists who carried out fieldwork in China, Korea, Southeast Asia and the Pacific were closely connected to the interests of the pre-war Japanese state (Van Bremen & Shimizu, 1998). Even decades later government funding for academic organizations in the US came not only from the US government but also later from the Japanese, Korean, Saudi Arabian or Chinese governments who saw it as a way to promote their own national interests in the US, Britain and Europe.

Our own case, JS, is widely known as one of the premier exemples of an area studies initiated out of an outright conflict with an enemy. Indeed, as Goto-Jones (2007) suggests, JS provided one of the foundational texts for area studies – Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword – which was written to help the US win the Pacific War (although published after the war’s conclusion). In Middle East Studies it was Bernard Lewis who throughout his long career helped create knowledge important for policy-makers. Such kinds of studies emphasized the “use-value” of scholarship leading to what Dutton (in Goto-Jones, 2007) calls applied area studies with value for government policies and including language training as a vocational rather than a scholarly pursuit. The “learn from Japan” boom of the 1980s likewise was an impetus for the growth of JS around the world at that time and is one such example of applied social scientific pursuits.

But as a number of scholars have shown (Kuper, 1973; Pieke, 2005; Prager, 1998; Ramstedt, 2005), area specialists have often been openly critical of policymakers. To generalize from Linke’s (1990, p. 143) comparative investigation, such cases suggest that the political quest for social knowledge is not only an instrument of power, but that it can also serve as a basis for opposition. Thus, not all area studies experts were subcontractors of the state and many were often highly critical of its policies (Dirks, 2003). In fact, the Bush administration’s attempt to link intelligence to financing area studies (not only Middle East Studies) was strongly resisted during the past decade in the United States (see for example, https://sites.google.com/site/concernedanthropologists/).

Two kinds of peripherality: Marginality and provinciality

The model that I have been sketching out allows us to understand two kinds of peripheral knowledge that have sometimes been conflated in writings about area studies (each having its own expression in JS): marginal knowledge and provincial knowledge (more detail can be found in Ben-Ari, 2017). Marginal knowledge is produced within the main US-British dominated system (or any academic system) by groups who are located at its fringes and who talk back to the centers in the world academic language of English. While they do so in a manner that is less fluent than scholars positioned in the centers they are nevertheless understood and the legitimacy of their participation in the system is accepted by those at the center (Gerholm & Hannerz, 1982, p. 9).⁵

From the perspective of the Euro-American center, knowledge produced within other (loosely coupled but independent) linguistic academic systems however, is frequently seen as provincial knowledge: one often labeled as parochial or insular. Because these other linguistic systems have their own research agenda, use locally produced analytical frameworks, and write for local audiences the knowledge they produce is “unfashionable,” “unsophisticated,” or “outmoded.” For all of the celebration of peripherality and diversity in the English-using center, the grounds for celebration are defined by this very center. Sociologically, for peripheral scholarship the center provides the crucial reference group.

This is certainly the case for how much of Japanese folklore is seen by English-using folklorists and anthropologists because it focuses on questions of origin and authenticity, questions that are viewed as old-fashioned and no longer as important. Similarly, Western anthropologists conflate anthropology and folklore in Japan despite their distinct pedigrees and agendas for research (Shimizu, 2000). To use an image suggested by Mathews (2004), scholars within and outside the English-using system seem to live in parallel universes. Asquith (2000b) sees a lack of willingness to dig deeply into alternative paradigms as the problem with scholars at the center. My model allows us to understand that the root of this problem is that scholars within the English-using system and outside of it are situated in very different systems of incentives and disincentives. It is, I think, for these reasons that Kuwayama (2000) cites examples of the arrogance and lack of respect among American anthropologist for the knowledge produced in Japan: they see it at best as data (if at all) and at worst as little more than parochial opinions. Conversely, to follow him (Kuwayama, 2000), scholars at the center have their own kind of provinciality because they can ignore foreign scholarship without damaging their own career, what I call the provinciality of the center.

Steinhoff (2012) rightly remarks that in the study of East Asia, whether focused on Japan, China, or Korea, one has to be able to utilize the scholarship written in the appropriate language in order to be taken seriously within the area studies community. Yet as the secondary literature in English on those areas has grown exponentially, scholars are expected to place their contributions within that scholarly context, that is English-language writing about Japanese society that is more important for scholars in this system. Hence, to get published they have to refer to other academics who have published about Japan in their system rather than to researchers who have developed frames for understanding this society but written in Japanese (or Chinese or Korean). Moreover, in almost all cases the theory used is one developed outside writings about the area. The governing variable in the relations between linguistic communities is the looseness or tightness of their coupling. By this I mean the degree to which each system is sealed off or is tied to the other. It is my impression that there is a particularly loose coupling between the various linguistic systems within which JS are carried out.

Only such a view lets us understand the truly global nature of the academic systems for producing knowledge that is divided between linguistic communities (each characterized by center-periphery relations) and organized hierarchically. In the marginal communities both within the English-using and other communities, scholars write about local cases and tend to “import” theories developed at the center and write for both local consumption and consumption at the center. For scholars in Japan, for example, the choice of going from being provincial to peripheral (and hopefully more central) involves career choices such as whether to pursue graduate studies, where and what to publish, the languages of publication and the paradigmatic boundaries one works within.

We can now understand – to put this point by way of examples – that the study of Japan in Israel, Singapore or Norway (parts of the English-using system) is marked not so much by parochialism as by marginalization or peripheralization in terms of the world system of scholarship. The very exposure of local scholars there to work outside these countries prevents them from becoming parochial but is mediated by works published in the centers of the English-using system. On the other hand, the orientation to the center comes at the price of being disconnected from local, “parochial” knowledge.⁶ It is in this light that various institutional solutions can be seen. For instance, the Graduate Program in Global Studies that is part of Sophia University belongs to the English-using system and is very loosely coupled to the Japanese one.

Within the core: The division of labor between disciplines and area studies

To return to our broad historical overview, like many area studies (Basedau & Kollner, 2006) so the post-war history of JS can be divided into three stages (Steinhoff, 2013; Sugimoto, 2013): the philological, the social scientific and that of (critical) cultural studies. Each stage is marked by its dominant form of knowledge: encyclopedic knowledge and language training; social scientific, policy and applied knowledge; and critical knowledge about wide facets of culture. However, a simple reading of this tripartite model is too linear since a better picture is one of a broad cumulative process in which each type of knowledge is added to the field and interacts and is often in tension with other types of knowledge. Moreover, while broadly linear, the actual years that different national systems went through them differ: after WWII the philological tradition continued much longer in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands than in the United States, and even longer in what was known as Eastern Europe. However, other fields such as African Studies or SEAS emerged with less of such an “encumbrance” of philologists.

But while this depiction underscores the tensions built into any area studies, it does not clarify the division(s) of labor between these studies and disciplines. This division of labor is the crucial variable in understanding the adaptive potential of area studies. Steinhoff (2012) posits an ideal type of this division of labor, contending that individual scholars may be pulled in opposing directions between the structural and logical differences in what she sees as the fundamental intellectual orientations of the disciplines and area studies, specifically between theory building and holistic understanding:

[T]he greatest tension has been between area studies and the social sciences, and it is the logic of the social sciences, modelled originally on the logic of the sciences and the scientific method, that often runs at cross-purposes to the logic of area studies. There is also a continuum within the social sciences, based on the extent to which the internal organization of a particular discipline recognizes geographic and cultural boundaries or cuts across them, so the logic of the social sciences is not applied uniformly in every social science discipline … The orientation of disciplines such as sociology, economics, and psychology in particular, and the trend over time of the social sciences in general, has privileged theories that cut across such naturalistic geographic and cultural boundaries and explicitly refuse to acknowledge them (emphasis added). (Steinhoff, 2012, p. 11)

Let me develop further Steinhoff’s insights about the differences between the disciplines. I propose that disciplines are characterized by differing professional disciplinary “folk models” and practices that govern the place of area studies within them. It is a “folk” model because it encompasses the assumptions and images that lie at base of common-sense knowledge we use in our scholarly world; the unquestioned knowledge that “all” scholars know (Ben-Ari, 1998, 2005). It is a “professional” disciplinary model because it provides the basic points of reference for “what we are” and “what we are trying to do” through which our specialist reality is constructed and through which we pursue our careers.

Accordingly, the professional folk model of anthropology in the English-using world involves three clusters of activities: doing research (fieldwork, field methods), writing texts (ethnographies, monographs, articles) and “careering” in academic institutions (universities, associations). As I have described elsewhere:

In anthropology, the ideal of professionalism involves a lone anthropologist (usually white-middle-class, no longer frequently male) from a university in a “Western” (American, European, Australian) center; s/he writes a proposal aimed at securing funding; crosses national geo-political borders and cultural boundaries to do an extended piece of fieldwork (usually a year or two) among another group; returns to her/his university to “write-up” research in a textual form called an ethnography; and it is this text (and accompanying articles published in journals) that is published and used as a means to advance an ideally tenured university career. (Ben-Ari, 1998, p. 390)

Anthropologists use this model to do such things as describe and prescribe proper behavior in the field, mark entrance via fieldwork into our community, and give advice to new members.

Historically, regional specialization has been a central component of Euro-American anthropological training and practice. Being known by your “place” – that is, your area of specialization – is important in publication, hiring, or tenure evaluations, especially during one’s early career (Lederman, 1998). For instance, anthropologists derive their identity from being parts of different professional sub-communities based on regions, receiving rewards and sanctions like those given by the AAA or AAS or publishing in certain journals.⁷ There are numerous examples of how area studies are constantly produced and reproduced through the practical, mundane endeavours of anthropologists. Take for instance, the internal arrangement of a volume edited by Yamashita et al. (2004) on anthropology in East and Southeast Asia. The various contributions examine Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, or Philippine anthropologies along with British, French or American ones. Based on the idea of discrete national anthropologies, their volume thus serves to further reproduce the assumption of a correspondence between states’ geo-political territories and the existence of “whole” cultures within them. Or, to provide another case, the volume on doing fieldwork in Japan (Bestor et al., 2003) is an example both of the assumption of the peculiarity of this country for research and the dominance of the American centers since the contributors are all from the US apart from one Australian and two British scholars.

At the same time, however, the study of culture areas in anthropology is different from interdisciplinary area studies, for in becoming an area specialist it is not enough to produce holistic knowledge. Rather, the prescription for anthropologists pursuing their career is to constantly link theory to empirical data. Take the term “cutting edge”, a favorite metaphor used by (mainly) American academics to refer to their being at the forefront of a disciplinary field (and well suited to the aggressive “publish or perish” dynamics). It is perhaps ironical that committed as they have been to holistic methods and perspectives, anthropologists nevertheless also use this imagery. In fact, Shimizu (2000) observes that the disciplinary requirements of American anthropology demand theorizing even at the expense of a thin empirical basis. Thus, in anthropology to get famous you need to theorize data rooted in various areas. A number of well-known examples derived from SEAS include Geertz’s (1980) suggestions about the “theater state” or Scott’s (1985) “weapons of the weak”.

Yet, anthropology is unlike economics or politics, since theory is mediated by the display of cross-cultural knowledge, and it is also unlike history or literary studies, because area specialization for its own sake can become a disability over the course of one’s career (Lederman, 1998, p. 431). When placed in a comparative perspective it becomes clear that anthropology differs from the other social sciences in terms of the degree to which a discipline organizes scholarly work in a way that recognizes geographic or cultural areas as “natural” subdivisions.⁸ Consequently we can understand why sociology was for a long time so resistant to the idea of area studies since its focus was on “us” as the object of study. When one does find the study of specific cultural areas in sociology they often get forced into a disciplinary category called “comparative sociology” whether the actual study is comparative or not. In fact, in major parts of today’s scholarly English-using world, the practice is to collaborate across areas by taking constructs developed in the US and other parts of the core and applying them to data from various regions. This kind of division of labor appeals to scholars outside the metropoles since comparative projects represent resources, travel and access to top-notch publications (Kennedy, 1997). It is for this reason that Jayasuriya (2012; see also Sato, 2010) calls Asian Studies the historical under-laborer for the social sciences. In this manner, the division of labor between area studies and the disciplines is also part of the division of labor between the center and the peripheries of the world system of the academy. Indeed, when “natives” arrive to do work at the cores it is often assumed that they will do work on their own societies, thus replicating the wider division of labor.

In contrast, the professional folk model of political science has undergone a change. While in the past area specialists were central to the discipline, today career advancement is dependent on theory and especially advanced statistical methods. In this new scheme, area studies merely provide data for analysis and critiques coming from rational choice or game theory. Indeed, for these kinds of scholars emphasizing the need for methodological rigor it is only natural to criticize area studies for their lack of ability to reach generalizations and law-based explanations. In Bates' (1997) words, this is a process by which old hands are giving way to young technicians. Accordingly, political science sees Japan as being like any other area in the sense that its politics can be understood using the same categories and variables as deployed elsewhere. Here, regional politics are little more than variations on universals. Such a view transforms ethnography and narratives into theory-driven claims amenable to refutation and requires precisely targeted observations to establish the force of arguments (Bates et al., 1998; Teti, 2007). It is in a like manner that Japan’s political system is placed in a comparative perspective in various books or volumes devoted specifically to the country’s system emanating from a universalistic point of view (Hook et al., 2012).

Demography or economics view data from different regions in an even more extreme manner: as fodder for analytical machines to spew out generalizable laws. To put it cynically, in this division of labor areas studies provided the raw material as part of the syndrome of data for dollars (Kennedy, 1997). Accordingly, when demographers, to put this point by way of that discipline, utilize Japanese data it is to explore and develop theoretical constructs developed in the Euro-American centers. Hence, non-Japan specialists in such disciplines as economics or demography feel their students could study Japanese society and the Japanese economy using quantitative datasets and the standard tools of the disciplines, and do not need the excess baggage of language and area studies (Steinhoff, 2012). Moreover, the practice of dual appointments in area studies and one of the social scientific disciplines or the humanities means that one’s career as a scholar is dependent at least partially on the criteria of the disciplines.

This move is further reinforced by the relative coherence of the disciplines and the spread, as we shall see in a moment, of the assumption of theoretical contribution into the humanities through cultural studies. In any case, it seems that in the social sciences the move is ever more towards theoretical sophistication. To “be anyone of consequence” in a discipline a scholar must not only master theoretical concepts but demonstrate (through publication) an ability to contribute to theory.

Engines of change: The politics of identity

Until now I have been primarily emphasizing the processes of reproduction of area studies in the English-using world. I now move to explore the transformations these fields have undergone during the past two decades. Probably the most significant change in area studies – expressed ultimately in the answer to the query “What is worthy of study?” – is the emergence of the politics of identity and multiculturalism in the centers of the Euro-American academy. Historically, the politics of identity harks back to decolonization in the developing world and the civil rights and later feminist movements of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. The dynamics of this politics in universities now revolve around groups (or their sponsors) using academic settings to challenge, explore and research aspects of identity through race, class, religion, gender, ethnicity, nation, or sexual orientation (to cover the main ones) (Tierney, 1997). These developments have been expressed through demands to set up new programs, change curriculums, address the particularities of groups seen as suffering historical injustices, or to produce new kinds of knowledge (such as calls for “indigenous” ways of knowing).

The main impact of the politics of identity has been the following: first, some scholars have called for integrating the critique at base of this politics into the criteria for appraising what is worthy of argumentation and study within the centers. Expressions of this move have been towards such developments as calls for the Islamicization, Sinification or Africanization of social scientific knowledge (Alatas, 2005; Chan, 1993; Dirlik et al., 2012; Pieke, 2005). In extreme cases, expressions of identity politics have been closely related to questions about who has the “authority” to teach area or other forms of peripheral studies and the argument that only “natives” can and should offer opinions about cultures that are their own. To the best of my knowledge, JS has been spared the more extreme of such claims. But expression of these developments in JS is mentioned by Steinhoff (2012) who draws attention to the fact that during the past decade there have emerged whole shelves of academic books about women, diversity and multiculturalism in Japan (Chung, 2010; Komai, 2001; Lee et al., 2006; Murphy-Shigematsu & Blake Williams, 2008).

Second, developments in the politics of identity have created a ready pool of students, many of whom turn to university area studies seeking to explore their own roots or identity. In JS this has been expressed in the alliance in some institutions between Asian and Asian-American Studies. By comparison, this move came later in African Studies since at their beginnings they focused on Sub-Saharan Africa to the exclusion of the African Diaspora, and only later there emerged an alliance between African and African-American Studies (Ferreira, 2010). Accordingly, within the US some new demands for area studies materialized out of undergraduate insistence that institutions provide ethnic studies, comparative literature, gender studies, cultural studies and new forms of international knowledge (Ludden, 1997).⁹ Two decades ago, Bencomo and Colla (in Kellner, 2001) observed that area studies were part of the US multicultural project and noted the way this project fetishizes individual identity politics.

Third, among scholars the politics of identity expressed itself in attempts to introduce forms of alternative knowledge not only as a critique of the racism at base of human sciences but also as a point of departure for the production of cultural identity (Dirlik, 2005).¹⁰ Tachimoto (1995) asserts that area studies have the potential to completely reconstruct the edifices of disciplinary theory from the bottom up. In sociology, Akiwowo (1999) has attempted to introduce Yoruba notions of sociation via Nigerian sociologists and philosophers. And Takayama (2011) in a critical review of works on comparative studies of Japanese education shows how the very discourse of this scholarly field constrains those writing in English about “other” education. But Xiaoying (2012) offers an empirically based cautionary note that most “native” concepts – he focuses on guanxi (connections) – are treated as objects of study rather than as starting points for social and organizational theory.

Fourth, in the academic market for students and scholars the knowledge offered by anti-racist and postcolonial discourse has come to have quite a high exchange-value and authority. As such, the “new” kind of knowledge produced in area studies was most valuable in adapting to the changed circumstances of the past two decades since it assured at least a modicum of material and non-material support. Where once arguments for area studies were made for strategic reasons combined with arguments about international understanding, today arguments are also made through constituency representation on the part of vocal communities (at times accompanied by community gifts and endowment projects).¹¹ Thus, my wider argument is that the adaptive capacity of area studies – like that of any organizational appendage – lies in constantly looking for legitimating resources within and outside of the academic environment.

But what about the interest in Japanese popular culture? This is surely the single most important source for the continuity and flourishing of Japanese Studies in the past two decades and spans the interests of all of the disciplines involved in JS (Shamoon, 2013). One only has to view the website of any JS program around the world to witness the huge resources mobilized and expended on research, teaching and publication in this regard. Here it can be argued that the attention garnered by forms such as anime or manga is very different from the attention derived from the politics of identity. Indeed, since the mid-1990s JS differs from other area studies in the political undertones and connotations it carries. Of course, parts of JS on gender, race and inequality are driven by a critical political orientation. But other fields such as Middle East Studies or African Studies are much more overtly politicized (Shenkar, 2012; Teti, 2007).¹² The political and critical emphasis in much of the research and teaching on Japanese popular culture has (arguably) weakened when compared to the tenor of academic deliberations about Japan during the 1970s and 1980s.

Yet the close connection between Japanese popular culture and the politics of identity can be seen in the following manner. To begin, the study of Japanese popular culture is closely linked to a dominant American version of the politics of identity in academia through the seeking of individual experiences via which one’s identity is sought, asserted and produced. While the beginnings of the study of popular culture go back to the Frankfurt School and critical cultural studies in Britain, it also encodes a celebratory version associated with the American Popular Culture Association and which often engages in uncritical affirmations of all that is “popular” (Kellner, 2001). In the 1980s, there was a turn within large swathes of cultural studies to celebrations of the popular, the pleasures of consumption, and affirmations of a postmodern global culture of multiplicity and difference. The preoccupation with Japanese popular culture is closely (but not exclusively) related to this politically neutered version of multiculturalism and its “joyful” emphasis on understanding and playing with other identities. These developments have taken place within emergent cyberspaces and modes of identities, interaction, and production taking place in the rapidly exploding computer culture. Sociologically, academic multiculturalism is most often propagated by a generational segment of broadly middle-class youths who have grown up into a digital environment.

A few chosen examples of these developments in JS are apt here. Temple University’s campus in Tokyo offers a “Summer Institute: Studies in Japanese Popular Culture”. It explains that,

Although courses focus particularly on contemporary popular culture, they are contextualized by broader perspectives on Japanese society and culture, with anthropological and sociological analyses of identity, media and contemporary social problems in mass society. The courses are comparative in nature, and are informed by academic discourses on globalization (the diffusion of cultural innovation in popular culture) and the influence of popular culture, both in Japan and abroad (emphasis added).

MIT’s course on Japanese popular culture explains that, “This course examines Japanese popular culture as a way of understanding the changing character of media, capitalism, fan communities and culture. Topics include manga (comic books), hip-hop and other popular music in Japan, anime (Japanese animated films) and feature films, sports (sumo, soccer, baseball), and online communication. Emphasis will be on contemporary popular culture and theories of gender, sexuality, race, and the workings of power in global culture industries” (emphasis added).

The University of Pennsylvania’s offering on Japan is the most explicit in its emphases:

This course provides a rigorous introduction to the academic study of Japanese popular culture. Through careful attention to forms of popular culture such as anime (animated films or television shows), manga (comic books), TV dramas, short stories, popular music, fashion and contemporary art, each one of us will be able to develop a better understanding of contemporary Japan. In order to deepen our knowledge, we will learn various methods for studying and writing about the relation between our everyday lives, the processes of globalization, and the pleasures or displeasures that we derive from the objects of popular culture. Through the application of theoretical models to our practical experience of different forms of Japanese popular culture, we will learn to analyze critically some of the functions that these objects serve as sources of meaning, escape, and identity formation in our everyday lives” (emphasis added).

Each of these course introductions links the study of contemporary Japanese popular culture to parts of the US academic multicultural project through the emphasis on individual experience, the main axes of gender, sexuality and race, and the ever-present prominence given to identity.¹³

In a complementary way, in the world of scholarship there is a huge – and eclectic – array of theories, concepts or frameworks to choose from in cultural studies (spanning the range between the Frankfurt School and poststructuralist approaches). Indeed, this situation has led Ferguson and Golding to observe that cultural studies is marked both by high visibility and an “infinite plasticity” enabling the field to absorb any conceivable topic. Kellner (2001) posits that the result is that cultural studies now means everything and nothing; it has effectively been conflated with “cultural criticism” in general, and associated with a cheery “Pop culture is fun! “ approach. One telling example is Tsutsui’s (2013) thoughtful essay about the need to link conventional historical analysis to the study of popular Japanese culture. This linkage is important both to convince historians that popular culture is a serious object of research and in order to appreciate the “imaginative diversity” of Japanese society, thereby overcoming stereotypes associated with it. More generally, the very plasticity of the study (and teaching) of popular culture is what gives area studies allied with cultural studies their adaptive potential. Since cultural studies – in all of its guises – provide ready theoretical and analytical frameworks it is easy to theorize data from one’s area of study. Hence the explosive growth of cultural studies and the emergence of popular culture as the primary pull factor in terms of teaching and learning are the bases for the adaptive potential of JS.

Conclusion

Let me recapitulate my argument and underscore two points by way of conclusion. My analysis focused on the following clusters of variables within which JS are situated. First, the world system of academic life is divided hierarchically into three tiers of linguistic communities with the first tier occupied by the dominant English-using system, a second tier populated by communities using other languages but characterized by a sufficiently large critical mass to sustain academic modes of production and consumption, and the third tier inhabited by smaller linguistic systems that are dependent on the other systems. These diverse communities are more or less tightly coupled. Second, each system is marked by a division of labor between cores and peripheries with the former producing and legitimating answers to questions such as “What is worthy of study?”. Third, within the English-using system the division of labor between the disciplines and area studies is based on professional folk models and practices that govern the way knowledge about regions is created and used in different scholarly fields. The broad move, however, has been towards ever-greater demand for theoretical sophistication and contribution in pursuing scholarly careers.

Fourth, sources of change are located in the environments of the academy: forms of material and non-material demands and resources provided by various actors such as governments, international bodies, and private benefactors who form market demands, or mandates of political decision-makers that push for change in the divisions of labor. Today these sources of change are no longer primarily politics and economics but also identity politics, the multicultural project and leisure pursuits. Fifth, the energy for these systems is provided by individuals or groups of individuals who pursue their academic careers. It is they who navigate the production of knowledge about various areas through producing and reproducing authoritative texts, prescribed models of career advancement, or institutional locations utilized to achieve aims (I have not dealt with this issue in depth in this article). It is these individuals or groups of individuals – some of whom are academic entrepreneurs, that is, individuals who initiate activities and link diverse networks and interests – who assure the survival of and provide the adaptive potential for area studies within changed divisions of labor and transformed environments. Hence, the adaptive potential of area studies like JS, as with any such scholarly fields, is embodied in these individuals who constantly scan the academic environments for resources. In times of threat, members of the field look for strategies that will assure its survival and resurgence. As we saw, the most significant changes that have occurred in JS have been the increasing emphasis on theorizing, identity claims in terms of disciplinary affiliation (including cultural studies) and the rise of diverse forms of multiculturalism that have accommodated Japanese popular culture.

At the same time as JS has adapted to threats to its existence and to the new environments that have emerged during the last thirty years, the broad structural characteristics of the English-using system I have been describing have not changed. First, it would appear that the expansion of world academic networks and the arrival in the US and Britain of scholars from every part of the world is a source of change. But Kennedy (1997) warns that this migration actually undermines area studies because migrants – the diaspora intellectuals – learn that academic mobility is best achieved by specializing in the subjects that are central to the concerns of the cores. Second, governments in such places as Japan, China, or Saudi Arabia have established research centers and endowed chairs at the centers. In this way, they serve the reproduction of the prestige and centrality of the world’s top universities. A very similar process can be seen in the establishment of various offshoots of British and American universities in China, Japan, India or SEA. And third, but perhaps the most important point, is that the use of English in the majority of scholarly meetings and the dominance of English-language publications in the scholarly world continue to reinforce the supremacy of the English-using world in general and its cores in particular. Knowledge of Japan is arbitrated by texts published almost exclusively by American-based scholars or in English-language journals and publishing houses. In fact, the influence of the politics of identity and the emphasis on theorization are pushing JS even further away from local knowledge and local academic knowledge.

More widely, within the centers of the English-using system area studies continue to be politically fragmented and compete with each other for resources based on their own evolving scholarly traditions and associations. Hence, despite problematizing areas and regions as foci of social scientific and humanistic objects of study, there are still very strong and adaptive institutional dynamics that keep them in place. Cultural studies – with their celebration of the peripheral – may make it paradoxically even harder for scholars from the margins to participate in debates since they increasingly demand ever complex mastering of jargon, terminology and analytical vocabulary. Hence, alongside texts devoted to new forms of knowledge focused on boundary-crossing, global dynamics or interdisciplinary studies, we find rather stable and institutionalized area studies that as political actors are inward-looking, boundary conscious and entrenched in individual university institutes, centers, programs and even full-fledged departments (Wojcicka & Lessinger, 1994). The growing strength of administrators, economic considerations in university decisions and the rise of a very large academic proletariat reinforce this weakness.

To conclude, I hope my essay contributes to what Ludden (1997) calls a theorization or theory of area studies or of area-specific knowledge(s). My argument follows Sugimoto’s (2013; also Kuwayama, 2017) plea that we need to extend the comparative angle inwardly towards academic institutions and to area studies like JS. To be clear then, my aim is not to add another deconstruction of area studies but rather to suggest that it may be fruitful to use the case of JS to think comparatively about the ways in which knowledge about areas is socially produced and reproduced.

Acknowledgments

For comments and questions on an earlier draft, I would like to thank participants at a conference on “Engaging with Japanese Studies: Revisiting the Question of ‘Why Japan Matters’”, at Oxford University’s Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies (March 2013) and participants at a seminar presented at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (May 2014).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eyal Ben-Ari

Eyal Ben-Ari was Prof of Anthropology at the Hebrew University and is now Fellow at the Center for Society, Security and Peace at Kinneret Academic College. He has carried out research in Israel, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. His main areas of research are the sociology of the armed forces, early childhood education, and popular culture in Asia. Among his recent books areJapanese Encounters (2018), (with Zev Lehrer, Uzi Ben-Shalom and Ariel Vainer) Rethinking the Sociology of Warfare: A Sociological View of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2010),(with Birgitte Refslund Sørensen)Civil-Military Entanglements: Anthropological Perspectives (2019), and (with Nissim Otmazgin) Creative Context: Creativity and Innovation in the Media and Cultural Industries (2020).   He has published articles in journals spanning a variety of disciplines including the American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, The Sociological Review, Sociological Quarterly, and the Journal of Strategic Studies. 

Notes

¹ I define area studies as a form of knowledge that focuses on what Schwartz (1980, p. 15) characterizes as “a cross-disciplinary unit of collective experience within which one can discern complex interactions among economic, social, political, religious and other spheres of life” within a specific geographical region. Thus for the sake of this piece I do not refer to such area studies as Jewish or Buddhist Studies. In a closely related manner, Quinanola (2011, p. 117) refers to area studies as a field of inquiry employing a multidisciplinary approach “to generate an encapsulated understanding of an area with all its peculiarities. Denotatively, an area refers to a portion of the earth’s surface inhabited by individuals whose identities are shaped and have been shaped by their social, political, economic or cultural interaction”. And Hall & Tarrow, 1988, n.d. distinguish three connotations of the term area studies among scholars: First, “a detailed description of a nation or region that does not explicitly seek to generalize beyond the specific case”, second “studies that build on a relatively deep and context-rich knowledge of a specific society or region to develop propositions of more general applicability”, and third “interdisciplinary teaching or research by clusters of scholars grouped together in a program focused on a particular region of the world”.

² Indeed, such reflections and questions have taken various forms each of which has its concrete manifestation in Japanese Studies. Scholars such as Chakrabarty (2007) and Connell (2007) have devoted themselves to “provincializing” Europe in order to underscore the Western biases at base of our theories and methods, and other researchers have called for recognition of indigenous knowledge as a source of understanding the world (Alatas, 2005). Other works have examined the various forms of boundary-busting dynamics of the post-Cold War world and the subsequent emergence of “border-crossing” within the social and human sciences. Yet another strand focuses on the continued hegemony of the United States in deciding what is worthy of study (Haney, 2008).

³ A discipline incorporates types of knowledge, expertise, skills, people, projects, communities, problems, challenges, inquiry, approaches, and research areas that are strongly associated with academic areas of study and clusters of professional practice. Moreover, “Interaction between scholars and institutions is in many ways shaped by their disciplinary affiliation. The seat of power for decisions on faculty promotion, tenure, and, to some extent, support for research and academic work, lies in the academic department” (Haney, 2008).

⁴ Eades (2000) suggests the image of stellar constellation to depict the world system of academia characterized by denser or sparser networks of academic ties. While his model well underscores the networked aspect of such a world system, the three-tier model underlines its hierarchical nature.

⁵ As a consequence, the social and the political organization of the English-using world system jeopardizes free access to multiple and plural perspectives of the social (Blagojevic & Yair, 2010). A potential source of ideas, theories, and paradigms is hampered by the hierarchical division of labor between scientists in the centers of science and their peers in marginal or semi-marginal countries, whose knowledge remains unutilized and side-lined.

⁶ Various solutions have been offered to remedy this situation. For example, Van Bremen (2000) looked to a solution in bicultural scholars. Given the limits of this article such solutions are beyond the purview of my study.

⁷ It is within regionally circumscribed epistemic communities that many of anthropology’s key concepts and debates have been developed (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997, p. 8): shame culture in Japan, caste in India, Big Man in Melanesia, or weapons of the weak or the theater state in SEA.

⁸ At the end of the 19^th century, the division of labor in the social sciences – according to the myth of origin of our discipline – led to anthropology taking (or being given) parts of the world that were not “Western” (with this claimed by sociology, political science or economics), not the “past” (claimed by history), and not “civilized” (claimed by Oriental studies) (Lederman, 1998, p. 435).

⁹ For example, Dirks (2003, p. 372) argues that “the single most important development on U.S. campuses in South Asian studies is not the growing intellectual exchange and collaboration among scholars but the growing numbers of students … who come from South Asian backgrounds, most of them children of immigrants.” In his experience at the University of Michigan teaching courses on South Asian civilization, he reports that it is not uncommon for 80% of the students to come from South Asian backgrounds.

¹⁰ For instance, Jayasuriya (2012; also Burgess, 2004) suggests freeing Asian studies from its marginalization in mainstream academic discourse and repositioning it within a global social science. The way to do so is by introducing experiences or cases that underscore differences and therefore analytical potential that is different from those of Europe and North America that dominate social sciences and introducing new methods, concepts and theories.

¹¹ To develop Szanton’s (2003) argument, while area studies laid the institutional basis – legitimacy, acceptability – for women studies, gender studies, African-American studies, ethnic studies, Asian-American studies, or cultural studies, these fields of academic activity have now allowed the regeneration of the older area studies.

¹² Debates and highly emotional disputes involve such questions of whether Israel should be included in the Middle East Studies Association, the kinds of journals willing to publish scholarship that do not fit radical political agendas and pro and anti-Israeli movements on American and British campuses.

¹³ This kind of emphasis, moreover, seems to well fit what Kellner (2001) calls the fetishism of the audience and of resistance.