The book Appropriate Japan focuses on the influence of Western art and culture on the construction of a Japanese national identity after the Meiji Restoration and how Japan transferred these values to its colonies of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria.
As the concept of culture developed in Europe in the 18th century, it did so in the context of expanding knowledge of the world and the possibilities of historical and regional comparisons. Since then it has been a major term for the selfdescription of Europe to assert its own identity. This selfdetermination includes a comparison of cultures, which is the demarcation between one’s own culture and the foreign culture. Only the differentiation of ‘our’ culture from ‘their’ culture, generates different cultures which are to be mediated against each other. In those colonial times the Orient became therefore a main construction of the West, a product of the communication system which created a counterimage of one’s own in order to produce the identity of the modern West by means of a twopart logic.
- Recruited Creativity: How Japanese Artists Narrated the War through Western Methods
- Germanisation of Japan and a little viceversa: A time of mutual promotion and National Socialism
- Creating Japan’s Propaganda: Shaping the Nation by Implementing Methods of German-Italian Fascism
- Out of the Shadows: How the West Shaped the Female Public Sphere in Japan
- Futurism, Dada, Avantgarde and Imprisoned: Japan’s Early Approach to Modern Art
- Dress up the Nation: Taiwan under Japanese Rule
- Mapping of: Invented Tradition :: Pictoral Map
- Mapping of: Korea under Japanese Rule
- Mapping of: Taiwan under Japanese Rule :: Pictoral Map