Communal/Plural, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1998 7 Pure Impurity: Japan’s Genius for Hybridism KoIcui IwABUCHI In the English language academic world, the term hybridity is often criticised for its uncritical and celebratory overuse. However, what has been prevalent in the analysis of Japan is not ‘hybridity’ but ‘hybridism’. Hybridism is a discourse in which the practice of Japanese strategic cultural assimilation of the foreign is ahistorically associated with a particular image of the Japanese nation: Japan as a great assimilator. This image represents Japan as a ‘sponge’ which constantly absorbs foreign cultures without ever changing its essence and its coherent identity. Whether articulated in celebratory or in critical overtones, the discourse on ‘hybridism’ essentialises the putative identity of Japan as @ culturally organic entity and suppresses the existence of ‘hybrid? subjects that Japanese colonial rule has produced. It is the duality of Japan as a non-Western imitator and as a coloniser that ‘hybridism’ masks and ‘hybridity’ reveals. Hybridity and Hybridism In the English language academic world, the concept of ‘hybridity’ has attracted much attention. In its favour, hybridity usefully counters exclusivist notions of imagined community as well as the essentialism and ‘ethnic absolutism’ involved in ideas of cultural ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’. Hybridity creates: the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge ... [It] displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom. (Bhabha 1990: 211) Detractors (e.g. Parry 1994; Thomas 1994), however, are critical of indiscriminate and celebratory overuse of the concept of hybridity. They problematise the concept’s implicit assumption of two mixed ‘origins’; lack of a notion of agency; neglect of materiality in favour of textual performance and failure to contextualise. Such theoretical debate is no doubt productive; preventing the popularised concept from becoming what Morelli calls ‘a fashionable theoretical passport’ (cited in Trinh 1995: 9). These arguments around hybridity suggest to many scholars that the concept has exhausted its critical potential. However, this sense of saturation is spatially biased because the concept is appropriated, deployed and examined only in certain contexts and geographies. For example, hybridity is discussed mostly in terms of non-Western cultural mixing under Western influences. The whole subject 1320-7873/98/010071-15 © 1998 Carfax Publishing Ltd72° K. Iwabuchi of hybridity between different parts of the non-West remains to be explored. It is saturation without maturation. Even at this time when the concept seems to have been overused, Aybridity has not gained much intellectual currency in the discourse on Japan. This does not mean, of course, that we must uncritically apply theories of hybridity to Japan. Neither does this mean there is no hybridity to be analysed in Japan. On the one hand, the lack of intellectual engagement refiects Japan’s denial of impurity/hybridity— Japanese culture is notorious for its obsessive claims of racial/ethnic purity and homogeneity. Japan’s supposed racial purity has been the very basis of Japanese construction of modern national identity. On the other hand, we can discern some distraction operating in the analysis of Japanese impurity. The concept of hybridity (in Bhabha’s sense) articulates the production of ‘impure’ (post)colonial subjects and cultural forms that problematise the very binary opposition upon which (post)colonial domination is grounded. Yet, ‘impurity’ in Japan is often discussed quite differently. Most commonly, Japan’s impurity is articulated in the image of a vociferously assimilating culture; Japanese modern experience is described in terms of appropriation, domestication and indigenisation of the West. The discourse of Japan’s assimilation of the foreign, however, tends to reinforce the exchusivist Japanese national/cultural identity. T argue that the Japanese capacity for cultural borrowing and appropriation does not articulate hybridiy but rather what I refer to as strategic ‘hybridism’. Japanese hybridism aims to discursively construct an image of an organic cultural entity, ‘Japan’, that absorbs foreign cultures without changing its national/cultural core. While hybridity is concerned with the ambivalent effect of colonial enunciation rather than its source (Bhabha 1994; Thomas 1994; Young 1990), Japan’s hybridism is more intentional and strategic from the outset. It does not merely arise in the aftermath of colonialism. It attempts to suppress the ambivalence of the colonial encounter by relentlessly linking the issue of cultural contamination with an exclu- sivist national identity. It does not create a liminal space which blurs fixed and exclusive national/cultural boundaries. Rather, it reinforces the rigidity of these boundaries. As Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (1994: 196) argues, the problematic of hy- bridism arises from the reconciliation of two ‘contradictory principles of cultural production—obsession with native uniqueness and the indifference of origins’. Impure origin is supposed to be purged by the Japanese tradition of cultural indigenisation. The Japanese capacity to appropriate, domesticate and simulate foreign cultures is imagined as a uniquely Japanese practice. Hybridism is thus based upon the concentric assimilation of culture, while hybridity emphasises the incom- mensurability of cultural difference. Hybridism assumes that anything foreign can be domesticated into the familiar while hybridity assumes an ‘awareness of the untrans- latable bit that lingers on in translation’ (Papastergiadis 1995: 18). Hybridity, therefore, destabilises the very notion of identity. Hybridism might be called a fluid essentialism in contrast to a static essentialism. ‘The trap of a static essentialism is to imagine a ‘pure, internally homogeneous, authentic, indigenous culture, which then becomes subverted or corrupted by foreign influences’ (Morley 1996; 330). In a fluid essentialism, by contrast, Japan isPure Impurity 73 represented as a sponge that is constantly absorbing foreign cultures without changing its essence and entity. The act of hybridisation itself is imagined as an essential aspect of Japanese nationhood. It should be emphasised that hybridism does not simply reflect the practice of Japanese strategic cultural assimilation. Rather, it is a particular way of narrating such practice. In other words, hybridism, as an organic national/cultural entity, is presumed in the process of talking about Japanese cultural assimilationism in an ahistorical, essentialist way. Although it is in the Japanese discourse on national/cul- tural identity that the practice of cultural assimilation is most ardently narrated as an instance of Japanese uniqueness, Western discourses are collusive in subliming Japanese strategic hybridism to the level of a recognised national essence. With the ascent of globalisation theory, Japanese modern experience attracts Western aca- demic attention. Japan’s long history of appropriating foreign dominant cultures seems to be a conspicuous counter-example to Eurocentric views of modernity. Western discourses on Japanese strategic hybridism do not celebrate Japanese cultural ‘uniqueness’, Rather, they attempt to displace Eurocentric views of history and simplified views of one-way cultural domination by the West over ‘the rest’ Such attempts, however, prove futile when ‘Japan’ is discussed as though it were an organic cultural entity whose cardinal body is eternally unchanged. Without decon- structing this assumption, any analysis of Japanese hybridism runs the risk of presuming an unwarranted substance to the object of study. Japan as a Culturally Hybrid Nation Within Japan, assimilation of foreign cultures has not always been viewed positively but also in a relatively negative, self-defensive or self-ironical manner. Since the mid-nineteenth century, when under threat of colonisation by the West, Japan has tried to emulate Western modernity. Indeed, rapid and selective Westernisation was at one time official policy (Westney 1987). In the face of apparent Western domination, the concept of an ‘uncontaminated’ Japanese essence has become part of the construction of Japanese national/cultural identity. Westernisation had to be balanced by Japanisation. The slogan, wakon yousai (Japanese spirit, Western tech- nologies) after the Meiji restoration in the mid-nineteenth century was a manifesta- tion of this need (Wilkinson 1991). The search for a national ‘essence’ in the sphere of race, ethnos and language has been a recurrent theme particularly since the 1930s, and has led to the prevalence of the infamous genre of nihonjinron (theories of Japanese culture, Japaneseness). Thus, the search for and construction of a pure ‘Japaneseness’ has gone hand in hand with the acceptance of significant Western influence. A great Japaneseness has also been advocated in terms of the Japanese capacity for assimilation (déuka) of the foreign. It is well known that the image of Japanese fusion of East and West was used to construct Japanese sovereignty over Asia as a national mission. In the first part of the twentieth century Japan, as a colonising centre, was concerned with the assimilation of non-Western (Asian) racial and cultural others into the empire as well as managing the absorption of Western ideas,