National Identities and Bilateral Relations of Japan and Russia

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This research project's main purpose was to contribute to the body of academic literature dealing with 20^<th> century Japan's relations with the Soviet Union/Russia by examining it from the perspective of national identity. The analytical framework deployed in this project defined national identity as a social construction of the national "self" which is defined vis-a-vis an array of external "others". This project examined a wide array of official documents, literary and academic works, as well as articles in journals and newspapers in both countries that in one way or another relate to bilateral relations. By applying the "self/other" framework this project analyzed the role of Japan and Russia in the construction of each other's identity in the 20^<th> century. In the case of Japan, this project focused mainly on the post-WWII era. It analyzed the dominant perceptions of the Soviet Union and Russia against the background of the Cold War and the domestic rivalry between the conserva … More tives and the progressives. In the context of the Northern Territories territorial dispute, this project paid special attention to the ideology of the Ainu movement, the challenge it posed to the dominant discourse on the Northern Territories and its discursive relationship with the contemporary debates on Russia in Japan. In the case of Russia, this project focused on the years in the immediate aftermath of the Russian revolution. It examined the dominant identity discourses that evolved around the notions of nation, race, class, capitalism and socialism and examined the Russian perceptions of Japan and China in relation to these discursive formations. Unlike other works on Pil'niak's travelogues from Japan, this research traces his impressions not to the Orientalistic difference between the two but to the similarity between Pil'niak vision on Russian national identity and Japan. Furthermore, this part of the project shows that, taken individually, hardly any of Pil'niak's ideas can be considered original if compared to the debates about the Far East in general and Japan in particular in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The uniqueness of Pil'niak's narrative, however, lies in the narrative taken as a whole. Namely, it is unique in its flexibility of moving from one taxonomy to another, from Marxist categories to racialist dichotomies of East and West. Less