| Summary: | This dissertation examines the ways in which Japanese martial culture was imagined and appropriated in Germany in the period between the Russo-Japanese War and the end of the Second World War. The relationship between Germany and Japan was, in many ways, exceptional and atypical in the modern era; unlike most other relationships between Western and non-Western nations, the German-Japanese relationship was not predicated on colonial or imperial dynamics of hegemony, but rather on the basis of mutual interest. This unique relationship created a logic of transcultural engagement that was significantly different than most other contemporary relationships between Western and non-Western cultures in that it reflected a blurring of the traditional lines between foreignness and semblance that was not dependent on official diplomatic relations.
Unlike Orientalism or Exoticism, which were predicated on the logic of cultural difference, the imagery and themes deployed in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century by both German and Japanese intellectuals, thinkers, and scholars explicitly sought to make Japanese history and culture more immediately recognizable and familiar to a German audience. This was accomplished by deploying a set of images and associations from the Japanese cultural imagination that can best be described as martial, masculine, and heroic. The most dominant of these images was the samurai warrior, who was presented as an idealized figure of ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic virtue; the stories and concepts surrounding the samurai as an idealized figure in Japanese nationalism -- bushido, Zen Buddhism, and ritualized suicide -- became entangled in existing German discourse about romantic heroism and idealized masculinity. This heroic imagery, which I refer to as transcultural romanticism, encouraged Germans to recognize themselves in the Japanese and in Japanese culture and served as the foundational German vocabulary of the discourse surrounding Japanese culture during this period. Ultimately, I argue that Japanese culture was ideally suited for this form of transcultural appropriation because it provided a narrative of cultural continuity and authenticity that many Germans were searching for during this period of ongoing crisis.
|
|---|
