Source — Iwabuchi, "Complicit Exoticism: Japan and Its Other"
- Title: Complicit Exoticism: Japan and Its Other
- Author: Koichi Iwabuchi
- Publication: originally Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1994), ed. Tom O'Regan; this project consulted the reproduction hosted at freotopia.org
- URL: https://freotopia.org/readingroom/8.2/Iwabuchi.html
- Date: 1994 (original journal publication)
- Accessed: 2026-08-30
- Type: secondary/primary — a peer-reviewed academic journal article (primary theoretical source for its own argument), reached via a third-party archival reproduction rather than the original journal site; the reproduction's fidelity to the original journal text has not been independently checked against a copy of Continuum 8(2) itself.
Extract
- Central argument: Japan does not merely receive Western Orientalism passively but actively participates in its own exoticization — a "complicit exoticism" in which Japan and "the West" mutually construct "Japaneseness" as irreducibly foreign, each side's discursive move reinforcing the other's.
- On Japan's own strategic self-exoticizing move: "Japan's strategy to construct and self-assert its national cultural identity has been the active exploitation of 'the West' which effectively counters Orientalism" — i.e., Japan turns the Orientalist gaze to its own advantage rather than simply resisting it.
- On the reciprocal mechanism: "Both the Other and the Self deploy the same discursive strategy, and the 'reciprocal recognition of others' solidifies each identity as somewhat factual" — each side's essentializing claims about the other end up validating both sides' self-image.
- Concrete example cited: Japan's own 1984 tourism campaign, marketed under the English slogan "Exotic Japan," which deliberately deployed Western stereotypes (geisha, Mt. Fuji) to sell Japanese culture back to Western (and Japanese) audiences — framed as proof that Japan had achieved a "triumphant mastery" of both tradition and modernity that the West had supposedly lost.
- The complicity, per Iwabuchi, works precisely because neither party challenges the underlying East/West binary itself — Japan's self-exoticization for marketing and identity purposes ends up reinforcing, not undermining, the Western assumption of Japan's fundamental cultural difference.
Gaps in this source (flagged, not filled here)
- Reached via a third-party web reproduction (freotopia.org), not the original Continuum journal issue or a publisher-hosted copy; page numbers for the quotations above are not available from this reproduction.
- Concerns Japanese self-representation broadly (tourism marketing, national identity discourse) — does not itself discuss "untranslatable words" listicles or komorebi specifically; this project's use of it to interpret that narrower phenomenon is the project's own extension, marked as such wherever cited.
- This project has not checked whether Iwabuchi's argument has been contested or revised in his own later work or by other scholars — filed as a single theoretical source, not a survey of the literature on Japanese self-Orientalism.