Among recent American travel writing to Japan, I would like to take up four texts from writers who occupy in one way or another the margins of the nation: Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk; Cathy Davidson, 36 Views of Mount Fuji; David Mura, Turning Japanese; and Lydia Minatoya, Talking to High Monks in the Snow. One aspect of the representation of Japan which is common to these texts is their deployment of a certain rhetoric of the uncanny, and the question that I want to address in this paper is how we might account for that rhetoric. It is my contention that Japan's uncanniness in the American geo-imaginary stems from its positioning in the global system as the site of the breakdown of first and third world binaries. The absolute dichotomization of East and West characteristic of colonial Orientalisms is also a way of reinforcing national difference, but this construction of national identity produces contradictory effects for ethnic, minority, or diasporic subjects, those who are marginal to the nation to begin with. In reading these texts, I propose to examine what they tell us about the vicissitudes of national identity in the postmodern era of globalization. Although predictions about the withering away of the nation certainly seem premature, there can be little doubt that the nation-state is being dramatically reorganized as part of the processes of global restructuring. This has tremendous consequences for the forms of national, racial, and ethnic identifications and imaginings of community. What Japan offers to the writers here is the opportunity to rethink the forms and meanings of American national identity.
One result of the breakdown of Western binaries is that Japan now provides a site for the reenactment of national identity formation, or what is otherwise called assimilation, an effect occasioned by the reversal of temporalities, in which the traumatic recognition of a perceived belatedness creates a space for the uncoupling of the nation-state equation. If an essential function of American travel writing has always been to explore and rehearse what it means to be an American, the texts in this chapter all approach in one way or another the decomposition of Americanness, rather than its constitution. Although the sensation of the uncanny that Japan provokes in Iyer, Mura, and Davidson takes on a particular configuration in each writer according to their histories and locations, it is Minatoya who most clearly exemplifies the general meaning of the uncanny in the other texts, for in her book, the uncanniness that is projected onto Japan returns quite clearly as the estrangement of home, the alienation that she feels as a Japanese-American in the US. It is Japan as imaginary community, I will argue, that provides a way to both represent and manage the breakdown of the processes whereby the nation naturalizes its fictive unity, as a result of the decentering of the nation-state in the global system.
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