Japanese Animation and Identity

Japanese Animation and Identity

In Orientalism, Edward Said claims that, “as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (5). The complex network of political, economical, academic, cultural, or geographical realities of the Orient called “Orientalism” is a way of coming to terms with the Orient, or to be less geographically specific, the Other. Although Said defines Orientalism to be specifically Franco-British experience in the Arab world, his basic arguments can be applied to the process of Othering in a more general sense. Especially his idea of “representation” plays a central role in the epistemology of Orientalism.

Representation, according to Said, can be characterized by exteriority and imaginativeness. Said affirms that “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West” (21). In other words, Orientalism assumes that the Orient cannot represent itself: as not being allowed the subject position, the Orient needs both political and linguistic representation by the West. This leads to the second point, the idea that the Orient has little to do with “real” Orient. The Orient, conceived as representation in written texts, is “a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as ‘the Orient’” (21). Said is not arguing that the true Orient is different from what Orientalists believe to be, but that the Orient is a dubious entity supported by the notion that there are geographica...

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