Podcast interview: Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto (eds.), “Rethinking Japanese Studies”
Rethinking Japanese Studies. Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region (Routledge, 2018) is co-edited by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto. The book tries to look at the discipline of Japanese Studies from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of contexts, starting from the premise that – as the authors put it – Japanese Studies is not the exclusive property of the anglophone world. In the volume, the authors try to answer several key questions: What variations are there among the academic communities of Japanese Studies in Asia? Is there a local intellectual approach that displays a degree of autonomy from the global scholarship in the English-using world? In what ways have some academic disciplines or approaches been affected by Anglo-Western scholarship to a greater extent than others? Why? What…