Over the years, Japanese anthropologists have problematized Orientalism as an apparatus of discourse and representation through which Japan is described as an exotic "other" in ethnographic accounts of Western anthropologists. Japanese anthropologists have also criticized the "world system of knowledge," which tends to marginalize and exclude Japanese anthropologists in the production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge about Japan. This paper is an attempt to develop, yet eventually critique and overcome, preceding criticisms of Orientalism and the world system of knowledge that supports it, from a specific position of a Japanese anthropologist working in an American university. The point of departure for my analysis is that the university today is an integral part of Empire, a global network of sovereignty that directly controls our productive capacity for social life as the source of its wealth and power. In particular, on the basis of participant-observations and interviews of students and teachers of all genders and varied ethnic and class backgrounds, the multitude, who study and/or teach Japanese language and culture at a public university in the southeast United States, the University of Kentucky, this paper aims to accomplish the following two tasks. First, I will provide a thick description of the ways in which the multitude apply their mimetic faculty-the faculty of becoming and behaving like the Other-to produce similarities, thereby transforming and dissolving the essentialized Self-Other dichotomy that Orientalism has produced and reproduced. To that end, I will ethnographically capture the multitude's engagement and immersion in various forms of Japanese culture, from kyudo (Japanese archery), Japanese anime, and Okinawa, to vocaloid, costume play, and the Japanese language. Second, I will theorize that mimetic deconstruction of Orientalism within a broader historical context of the formation of Empire. Specifically, I note that Orientalism, reconstituted today as a postmodern cultural apparatus of Empire, is now mobilized not to oppress and exclude Others (as Said described in reference to modern European colonialism) , so much as to integrate them and then orchestrate their differences in the system of control and management at the level of everyday social life. Situated within and positioned against that postmodern form of power, the multitude, I suggest, have begun to appropriate and rewrite Orientalism, by mimetically producing "Japan" as a biopolitical time-space of communication, fantasy, skills, and intimacy in a manner that challenges "employability," "success," "personal responsibility," and other creeds of global neoliberal regime Empire effects. I define that biopolitical time-space, constructed at the interface of Empire (power over life) and the multitude (power of life), as the sanctuary. What will emerge from my description and theorization are four characteristics of "Japan" as a global sanctuary. First, postmodern Orientalism, mobilized in Empire, tends to reproduce the stereotypical images of Japan through the ideas of tradition, mystery, and sensuality, and the multitude in the sanctuary critically diversify such images. Second, while postmodern Orientalism tends to essentialize the subject of Japanese culture as Japanese and nothing else, Japan as a global sanctuary is radically open to anybody with regards to race, gender, and class. In so doing, the sanctuary constitutes itself as a time-space of hybridity, where the multitude freely collaborate and negotiate across national boundaries so as to produce new morals and norms of life within and against Empire. Third, while postmodern Orientalism mobilized in Empire tends to reproduce a rigid binary between Self and Other, the West and the rest, the multitude in the sanctuary dynamically nullifies it by
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