From the Nationalism of Hikikomori to the Transnational Community of Hope

• In Event: Envisioning the Future In, Through, and Against “Japan”: Interdisciplinary and Heterolingual Approach to Hope

Abstract

In East Asia today, we are facing the end of Pax Americana. One of its most conspicuous consequences in recent decades is the rise of jingoism in Japan, in which the Japanese Government openly wishes to return to the containment policies of the Cold War years, while resurrecting the glorious image of the Japanese Empire that should have perished at the end of the Second World War. I would like to view this peculiar form of Japanese ultra-nationalism from the perspective of collective shame and hikikomori (reclusive withdrawal) in Japanese society. In contradistinction from this collective desire for national communion, I want to suggest an entirely different project of community formation: community guided by the will for transnationality, the commitment to intellectual communality that cannot be reduced to the principle of nationality.

Author

• Naoki Sakai, Cornell University