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 are the potential contributions of Japanese Studies in the Asia-Pacific to Japanese Studies globally?
In the interview, co-editor Kaori Okano answers some of these questions.
(This podcast interview was first published here on the New Books in East Asian Studies channel, part of the New Books Network.)