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Notes -
Thanks for this; I was familiar with rangaku and the Dutch trading ports, but I wasn’t aware of how the policy fit into a broader East Asian model (or the Prussian Blue fact!) and I do always appreciate having any oversimplified assumptions of mine corrected.
Only tangentially related, but on the topic of Edo Japan, I happened to read yesterday a paper written by a Japanese historian weighing in on the Anglophone discourse about how the Edo era provides a successful example of gun control policies (which America ought emulate). There was a book written in 1979 by an American professor (of English, according to the paper, not history) arguing that there were approximately no guns in Edo-era Japan, and that the resulting level of peace in society was due to this voluntary society-wide abandonment of the gun. It’s thus an existence proof of a society that made a choice (one that America could make as well) to put away guns, so naturally, this book ended up cited quite a bit (even in the past decade) in “mainstream” discourse about American gun control.
Only problem is, as the paper’s author shows, this book was just wrong: guns were rather widespread in Edo-era Japan (to the point of being a primary weapon used on both sides of one particular rebellion, albeit one that happened relatively early on), even if their use was heavily regulated by government (like violence in general, rather than gun violence qua gun violence; the author paints a picture of a government with a rather large state capacity and a willingness to use it). So the causality here is less “no guns -> no guns fired in anger -> peaceful society” and more “large state capacity -> no guns fired in anger -> peaceful society”.
Anyway, I bring this up not due to any object-level concerns, but rather because to me, this seems like another example of Wakandaism, where Westerners like me invent their own image of Japan to serve as a (fictional) example illustrating why their politics are correct. (There’s gotta be a better word for this than Wakandaism; maybe Orientalism?) You pointed out correctly that Edo Japan wasn’t untainted by the corrupting influence of the West, and apparently it also wasn’t untainted by guns either. At least, that’s my read on it.
I pretty much agree, yeah. Though Orientalism seems to imply that this viewpoint is one unilaterally imposed on Japan by Westerners; while that can be the case and it perhaps was in the example you offer up, I'd note it can be a two way thing where the romanticism is sometimes the intended outcome. The current-day Wakandaism of Japan was partially stimulated and encouraged by Japan itself in the post-war period to rehabilitate their global image from being that of an imperialistic enemy-state (see "Cool Japan"). There were both economic and geopolitical incentives to produce cultural exports, and there was government interest in using pop-culture diplomacy as a branding strategy (especially in the 1990s onwards).
The fact that there are weeaboos is not surprising; many things that Japan produced with its newfound economic power were massively intended for foreign consumption, with local Japanese elements downplayed for that reason. An early example of extremely successful Japanese cultural export was NHK's "Oshin", which was aired in many countries essentially free as a soft power gambit, with care taken to not trigger a sense of "cultural invasion". The kawaiiness and globalised nature of Japanese media was a way to make the product maximally approachable and unthreatening to international audiences (see the concept of mukokuseki (無国籍), or statelessness). These trends eventually also ended up spilling over into the local media landscape - in this light, the notion of Japan as an untouched land is a bit ironic. It's sometimes hard to know if the Wakandaism stems from people wanting to promote an untainted view of Japan because it legitimises their politics, or if it's the other way around and people attach their politics to something already high-status and exoticised for legitimacy.
South Korea seems to be undergoing a similar trajectory, gaining a huge amount of soft power by consciously adopting international idioms for broader appeal. And this is not to say I think this media is bad at all - I quite enjoy a good amount of Japanese and South Korean media. OTOH, a stark counterfactual is China, who in spite of economic success failed to develop significant soft power overseas and never really appropriately globalised their media (I actually really like many Mainland Chinese media properties, and this is not to say China absorbed zero foreign influence either, but there's a certain obstinate insularity to Chinese media; appreciation often relies on a preexisting understanding of a foreign cultural meta).
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That seems reasonable. Lots of older writing does similar things with imperial Chinese bureaucracy - projecting the author's ideal society onto a distant exotic land. And the original orientalists did the same with the "golden age of Islam" version of the Middle East.
I tend to think of the general phenomenon as "utopian foreign" for lack of a better term, after seeing a bunch of similar thinking in old media about Europe/America in other languages.
(Funnily enough, the only weeb I know in real life is a black DBZ fan. But that's obviously regional.)
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