Describing people far away from us: an examination of publications on Latin American politics in Japanese

• In Event: Latin America in Japan and Japanese Immigration in Latin America

Abstract

In response to one of the two main topics of LASA Congress 2018, which is to examine “how people in other regions study and perceive Latin America”, this paper selects representative works on Latin American politics published in Japanese to figure out how Japanese Latin Americanists have described Latin America. Given that any description of human society is value-laden, the images of Latin America that appear in these publications reveal the authors’ interests, ideologies, and the spirits of the time (zeitgeist) that oriented their thinking. The works under analysis will be classified in four groups with respect to the year of publication: prewar (works published from 1900 to 1930), wartime (1931 to 1945), Cold War (1946 to 1989), and post Cold War period (1990 to the present). A comparison of the four groups will shed light not only on a variety of characterizations of Latin America but also on differences and unexpected similarities among the groups.

Author

• Takahiro Miyachi, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo