【by Hitomi Koyama and Naoki Sakai, Dec. 2025】
Hitomi Koyama (hence HK): Thank you so much for taking the time to conduct this interview today. The date today is October 31st, 2025, and the United States is under the second Trump presidency. There is a lot happening in the states since the start of Trump 2.0. In the name of combatting anti-Semitism on campus, the administration has been intervening into US higher education. There are also attempts to intervene on the content of education in Republican dominated states and arrests of international students who have been vocal in their support of Palestine.
Yet, less attention is paid by the media on the defunding of area studies. This was a move already spelled out in Project 2025. There is a gutting of the National Resource Centers (NRCs) Program as of this September that is affecting the funding of 122 projects on East Asia, 78 projects on South Asia, 59 projects on Southeast Asia, and 21 projects on Asia more broadly. This cut affects projects in University of Chicago, Cornell, and Columbia, too. To be sure, the NRCs was created in 1958 under the National Defense Act so that universities can train regional experts to aid in Cold War politics, so its origin is problematic. But area studies in the US has also been a site where critical scholarships of Pax Americana have also been produced.
So, to quote Michael Bourdaghs, “East Asian Studies continues to thrive as an institution that too often still underwrites American and other forms of power. But the field also continues to harbour transgressive possibilities: it is by its nature interdisciplinary, allowing potentially for productive crossings . . . link[ing] together critical voices from within East Asia to counterparts in North America and Western Europe.”
I consider myself a beneficiary of this transgressive possibilities because I attended UC San Diego as an undergrad for Japan Studies, at a time when figures like Lisa Yoneyama, Tak Fujitani, Masao Miyoshi, and Stefan Tanaka were part of the program.
Now, the aim of this special topic for Critical Asia Archives is to start a conversation about the impact the Trump administration has on area studies and critical Asian studies, and to this end, I want to hear more about this relationship between area studies and transgressions—that is, the productive dimension of these transgressions. You have been at the forefront of these transgressions in my eyes. I came across your writings maybe more than ten years ago when I was a graduate student.
So here is my question: how did your critical take on the origins of the area studies get shaped?
Naoki Sakai (hence NS): Please allow me to give a general assessment concerning higher education in the United States of America. The situation in which the US institutions of higher education face implicates many issues, and I do not feel prepared to speak about a wide range of problems. Because I retired from Cornell University five years ago, I have not directly engaged in teaching or been involved in university administration, student admissions or research funding. The current kind of downplaying of scientific and professional education and research in the United States includes many issues. Certainly I am not qualified to speak about on-going administrative problems.
Apart from the problems of American higher education directly related to the political conditions introduced since the mid-2010s, and particularly since the early 2025, one thing that we cannot overlook about the overall trend restricting university education in the US is the retreat of the so-called Left since 1980s, and the general trend of neoliberalism with an absence of critical and systematic reflection on capitalism. Furthermore, a basic ignorance of the Marxian vocabulary, particularly in the United States, has been of the serious hindrance.
And let me just talk about my own experience first, then we can move into the general topic of area studies.
Last year, I was asked to teach as a visiting professor at Tokyo University in Japan for one semester. During my teaching period there, Professor Tsuyoshi Ishii conducted a dialogue with me, that was later published in the Japanese journal Shiso [思想]. In it I talked a bit about how I got involved in the discipline of area studies when I joined the graduate school at the University of Chicago in the late 1970s. Prior to 1979, I had nothing to do with the discipline(s) of area studies.
In the late 1960s, when I was an undergraduate student studying at Tokyo University, I became involved in what was then called “the Tokyo University Struggle,” or “Todai Tôsô (東大闘争).” It started in the department of medical science where some graduate students were experiencing rather unfair institution settings, and they began to criticize the authoritarian structure of the university. The students’ criticism gradually spread and began to involve those from other disciplines. And this critique was also broadened as an intellectual and political movement as the students began to expand the scope of their criticism beyond the unfair status gap between faculty and students; it began to problematize the system of university knowledge production in general. In this respect, particularly important was the public reputation of the University of Tokyo, namely, how Tokyo University students were viewed by the general public. Around that time, being the top university in the nation, Tokyo University was often taken to be the symbol of success in Japan. There was no problem with employment for graduates of Tokyo University; graduation from Tokyo University was often taken to be a sign of elite status.
And I was a student there, so that I thought I was studying at the top university in the country. Hence, I was allowed to presume that my future was promised. And in that way, many of the students working in Japanese education were motivated and forced to compete with others; they studied hard and were aspired to produce knowledge.
Nonetheless, that incident, the Tokyo University Struggle, called into question the very attitude of such a student. It forced students like me to reflect on how I was persuaded to want to enter the university, what motivated me to participate in university research, and why I justified building my career in my particular field of knowledge. No doubt, the Tokyo University Struggle served as an occasion in which I was solicitated to question why I chose the University of Tokyo, how I regarded myself in relation to other young people of my generation, and on what grounds I accepted my self-esteem as an elite and successful person in Japanese society. This process went beyond the domain of personal concerns, and gave rise to the whole question of power and knowledge.
I first began as a science student, registered in the section “Science One,” and I wanted to be a specialist in theoretical or applied physics. But that whole incident changed my career. It forced me to be doubtful about my professional career.
In 1968 when the Tokyo University Struggle exploded, Michel Foucault happened to visit Japan for the first time, and by chance he gave a public lecture at Tokyo University in the midst of the student uprising on the Komaba campus (one of the two major campuses of Tokyo University). Although my French was not good enough at all because I had just started studying it the previous year, I attended his lecture. Even today, I don’t know why I was attracted to his talk, but I went to hear him at one of the large lecture halls. His entire lecture was given in French, and this was without simultaneous translation. I do not think I could comprehend a single word of his lecture.
Nevertheless, I was extremely impressed by him and his talk, so that, immediately afterwards, I went to a French bookstore in Shinjuku, one of the City centers, and bought a few of Foucault’s publications, including The Archaeology of Knowledge.
At that time, there was only one Japanese translation of his works, The Birth of the Clinic (Naissance de la Clinique). Of course, in the publications I happened to purchase Foucault did not discuss either university education or student struggle, but his books were inspiring enough to sustain my interest in the question of knowledge and power, so that eventually I could connect the whole question of what was going on at Japanese universities with the general question of knowledge.
From 1969 on, I was always concerned with my involvement in the Tokyo University Struggle and the questions of knowledge addressed by Michel Foucault. In 1970 I made up my mind to move from the field of science and engineering, and joined the department of philosophy, where I wanted to confront these questions of knowledge and power. The department of philosophy was a disappointment, however. So I decided to leave university completely, and in 1972 I went to London and started working for a small company there.
There was a general coal-miners’ strike in the United Kingdom in 1973, and the conservative government of Edward Heath imposed what was referred to as a “three-day-a week” policy. Unsurprisingly the new company I worked for went bankrupt and I lost my job in the UK. There was no other choice but to return to Japan. On my return I had nothing to do, so I decided to work with my father to create a company for environmental technology. However, as the company became successful, I was involved in work, such as general management, marketing, entertaining clients late into the evening and so forth, and I was desperate for books. So I started thinking about returning to university. For the first time, I realized university was a wonderful place with the freedom to read books.
It is the common-sensical rule of society that you are not allowed to read books when you work. Until then I didn’t realize how reading books has a tremendous prestige. Upon this realization, I applied to many Japanese universities for graduate school.
In my graduate applications, however, I said I wanted to read Japanese texts without assuming the narrative framework of Japanese history or Japanese literature. Indeed I was concerned with how to change the disciplinary framework of Japanese history and literature, and so I received no response. I was completely rejected and a friend suggested that I should try American universities. So, in 1976, I visited universities in the United States and then asked about the possibility of graduate work there. To my great surprise, most of the American universities were very, very positive about my application, but in particular the University of Chicago astonished me. When I went there, on the spot, the faculty said “You should come, we will pay all your expenses, tuition and even living expenses.”
Of course, I was shocked and very happy, but I could not join Graduate School at Chicago immediately, since I had to take care of the company I was running with my father, but eventually I went there three years later. Our company was in the black for the first time in 1979. So my wife and I left Japan for Chicago. There were two professors, Tetsuo Najita and Harry Harootunian in the department of Far Eastern Civilizations and Languages who encouraged me to come to Chicago. They were both critical of the discipline of area studies, mainly because of its political and ideological commitment to the Cold War and US Imperialism.
In the field of various studies on Japan, they were rather notorious and often called “Chicago Mafia”; people, for instance, from Harvard, Stanford, or Berkeley or Yale, Princeton, all these Japanologists marked the Chicago faculty as sort of exceptional and infamous because of their criticism of area studies as a discipline. But I was very fortunate since my advisors freely encouraged me to conduct my graduate work in reference to critical theories on the one hand, and beyond the scope of either national history or area studies framework on the other. I mainly relied upon Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in my dissertation research. These are two completely different thinkers, but I read the text of 18th century Japan under their theoretical guidance. In 1980 I received my MA and immediately moved on to PhD research and completed my dissertation, Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in 18th-Century Japanese Discourse, in two years. To my surprise, the faculty of my teachers offered me a position of assistant professor in the same department, and I applied for a work visa, and then started officially teaching the following year.
I addressed a number of problems concerning the manifestation of phonocentrism in 18th-century discourses, and the mythical projection of Japanese language as against Chinese writing or ideography. In the 18th century there was no notion of Japan, either as a nation or as having a Japanese language. Both the Japanese nation and the Japanese national language were created in modernity during the Meiji period. Then, for the first time, the idea of the Japanese language was invented by a small number of scholars in National Studies (國學). They argued that the original spoken language of Japan had already been dead, and projected its presence into the pre-historical past before Chinese writing was introduced into the Japanese archipelago. Of course, the modern scholarship of Japanese literature and Japanese history completely ignored the modernity of Japanese as a language and as a nation. I called this “the stillbirth of Japanese.”
Even today, the actual practices of the Japanese language are very strange in so many respects, because it is sort of grafted onto the Chinese classical language, generally called “kanbun (漢文).” Japanese texts appear to be composed of a strange mixture of ideographic and phonetic signs. Thus, Japanese contemporary writing may be read as a translation of Chinese characters. Hence, if you pursue this feature of Japanese texts rigorously, you can reach the conclusion that there cannot be the Japanese language as a systematic closure, as a naïve conception of the ethnic or national language.
We should not forget that, until the 19th century, the cultural elites in Northeast Asia could rely upon the Classical Chinese or Wenyan (文言), and that they could communicate among themselves through Brushtalk (文言文) in or among countries in what is nowadays called the Sinosphere by area experts. This is one reason why nationalist intellectuals who wanted to create modern nations tried so hard to abolish the uses of Chinese characters in North Korea or Vietnam in their process of creating their national languages. The same perspective in fact applies to Europe until the 18th century since it was only in the 18th and the 19th centuries when the national language was institutionalized.
There was no such thing as national languages in Europe, either, until the 18th century. Prior to that, most intellectuals wrote in Latin or in very small number of cases in Arabic. And, in 18th century Greek became fashionable. We know the gradual discovery of popular languages of commoners through the various translations (German, English, Spanish, etc.) of the Bible, and from the 16th century onward, they gradually started writing in so-called popular languages of the regions. National languages were invented rather very, very recently.
And in this sense, Jacques Derrida really helped me because he read phenomenology from this viewpoint. Well, of course, I am referring to what is usually called “deconstruction.”
Thereupon, the central thesis that I pursued in my entire dissertation at Chicago was the stillbirth of the Japanese as an ethnos and a language. How the Japanese language was imagined for the first time in the 18th century in Japan, not as a living language but as a dead language of the past. That is why I was particularly concerned with the stillbirth of the Japanese as a language and as an ethnos.
Of course, I could not be indifferent to the historical significance of the formation of area studies in the United States, which could have been analyzed from many viewpoints in the late 1980s when I was writing my dissertation and revising it for publication after that.
In 1987, I moved from Chicago to Ithaca. At Cornell, I started working on the problem of power, knowledge, and education extensively. Of course, I could not overlook the disciplinary formation of area studies, and its affiliation with Pax Americana. One important issue I pursued was the status of theory in the disciplines of area studies.
Theory, of course, can signify many different things. In the fields of area studies, the positivist conception of theory was dominant. So I had to start with a critique of positivist notion of theory that had been accepted by the vast majority of area experts. By theory, I could not endorse the most common understanding of theory in the positivist conception of theory, namely, the application of general formula to particular cases. I could not equate “theory” to the general formulae applicable to particular empirical cases.
One must involve an effort to analyze very discursive formations in which knowledge is supposed to be produced. Of course, the issue at stake was subjectivation. Particularly important was the configuration of positionality for one who seeks to “know” in area study discourses. It is the allocation of positionalities for those who serve as “subjects to know” in area studies and those who serve as “objects to be known” there; first of all, it manifests itself in the mode of “a division of labor” in the structure of epistemic positionality. Perhaps, you are familiar with this problem since it has been extensively criticized in the discipline of cultural and social anthropology. There are many aspects to the epistemic and social division of labor in area studies, and I hesitate to simplify the problematic of subjectivity, not only the discipline of area studies but also in the fields of the Humanities that are still organized by the dichotomy or bi-polarity of the West and the Rest.
Since we do not have much time, we cannot get into a detailed examination, but it is undeniable that the problem of positionality in area studies could not be freed from that of the complicity of academic knowledge production with US imperialism, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s when I was working on my dissertation.
The problem has not diminished in the 21st century at all. But, for the last few decades, it has been articulated to a number of new concerns, one of which is what I called “the end of Pax Americana.” It seems to me that one cannot afford to overlook “the end of Pax Americana” if one tries to answer the set of questions you raised at the beginning of this interview about the United States administration’s policies on higher education and the presence of international students here.
One possible context that cannot be ignored is the articulation or association of area studies to the global strategy of Pax Americana since the late 1940s. The overwhelming reality of Pax Americana is symbolized by the global use of the English language, in which both of us are engaged. Since the end of World War II, the strategy of Pax Americana has transformed the everyday reality of a huge number of people in the world. One may believe that area studies programs are about a relatively small number of countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and so on, but the future of area studies, as a matter of fact, cannot be divorced from this global condition: increasingly, we tend to expect area studies programs to play the role of global studies. Yet, there are some conditions which prevent them from playing that role. Of course, one such condition is what I mentioned above with regard to the structure of epistemic positionality.
HK: Thank you, since earlier you mentioned about the tension between University of Chicago and places like Harvard and Stanford, can you map this further? You got invited to give a talk at places like UC San Diego, but more broadly, how frequently did you get invited to talk about area studies critically in US? Did you get a lot of invitations to discuss this in other universities?
NS: Not really within the US. It’s strange that I was once invited to talk about area studies at Columbia, but, generally speaking, the other universities I have been invited to are mostly those campuses of the University of California system. Outside the US—Western Europe, South Asia, East Asia, Canada, and Brazil— there have been some universities who wanted me to speak critically about area studies. Leiden was one of them where we met for the first time. So, I can say that, within the US, the general sort of the critical trend was prominent in California. I understand why I was asked to focus on the disciplinary formation of area studies in California partly because a comparatively large population of non-European immigrants—Asian American, Asian, and Latino students—lived there. In this sense, I could perceive some difference between my audience in California and elsewhere in the US.
Harvard and Yale, and then to a lesser extent, Princeton for instance, were relatively reserved as far as the topic of area studies was concerned. Initially, even Duke was not much different from those Ivy League universities. But, it changed drastically in the late 1980s and 1990s, mainly thanks to Frederic Jameson. A number of scholars including Rey Chow, who were critically concerned with the discipline of area studies and the Cold War hegemony of the United States, joined the Humanities programs at Duke after teaching at Brown.
Area studies programs were designed under the political climate of the Cold War (what some people call “the First Cold War” nowadays) and promoted the Westerner view of Asia, Africa, Latin America and so on. In that sense, their attitude was not much removed from that of cultural and social anthropology of the earlier period. Whereas, in the 1980s, the academic disciplines of cultural and social anthropology were severely criticized by anthropologists themselves, most of area experts remained indifferent to such reflection on their own academic knowledge production. The criticism of cultural/social anthropology argued that the academic programs of anthropology operated under institutional conditions of typical racism, of modern colonialism, and continued to produce the Euro-centric view of the so-called “natives.”
The structure of area studies was not innocent in this respect; then we began to examine the discourse of area studies from these viewpoints. Not surprisingly, the majority of area specialists really disliked what some of us were trying to do at Chicago.
HK: This really provides the context to understand the education I was receiving in University of California. You said Duke shifted in terms of how they react to critique of area studies, but have you noticed any other shift in other US universities?
NS: At least I could see what amounts to a duality or ambiguity in the very status of area studies today. Some, but not all, area experts began to be much more reflective or doubtful about what they had been programmed to do. At the beginning of this interview, you talked about the current American situation, which I referred to with regard to “the end of Pax Americana.” Because, for the past 80 years since the close of World War II, the United States more or less dominated the so-called First World and some parts of the Third World because the Soviet Union still existed. But since the 1990s, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US seemed to have maintained a global hegemony.
But now, its global hegemony is falling apart in some respects, the North Atlantic Alliance is crumbling, and the collective security alliance in Northeast Asia is getting uncertain against the increasing prominence of the People’s Republic of China. There is tremendous anxiety, not only within the United States or Western Europe, but also among America’s satellite states in Northeast Asia.
In many ways already in the 2000s, California reflected that kind of anxiety. As you are aware, since you studied in that system, more than 50% of students are either Asian or Asian American. The new configuration of young people receiving higher education in California gives a certain sense of insecurity to the white population who surreptitiously believe in white supremacy; it also gives tremendous anxiety to Asian American and Asian students who work in the University of California system, who know they could easily be threatened by working class whites who are resentful of their success. Both colored and non-colored people have a tremendous feeling of insecurity, even though their senses of anxiety come from opposite poles. At the core of anti-immigration propaganda is this sense of uncertainty over the racial hierarchy of US society as well as the modern world at large. Of course, the history of United States settler colonialism is one element we can never overlook in this construction of Eurocentrism in modernity.
Until the end of the 19th century, as Aziz Rana brilliantly analyzed, the citizenship of the American nation relied upon an assumption of whiteness, no matter how difficult or impossible it was to determine conceptually what constituted “whiteness.” I think the current administration is trying to repeat a crude kind of white nationalism to openly appeal to this huge anxiety. But, I do not think this anxiety is limited to the United States.
In many ways this global anxiety is a reaction to the end of the basic structure of the modern international world in which so-called Europe (more recently the West, meaning the North Atlantic Alliance) has dominated the international world. In this history of the international world, countries and peoples outside Europe, such as China, India, Brazil, and those in Africa, were exempt. By the end of the 19th century, consequently, two thirds of the land surface of the earth had been colonized. This is the way in which “the spatial structure” of the Eurocentric world was created, as Carl Schmitt argued. It is not difficult for you to see that area studies programs reproduce the basic structure of the modern international world. Hence, in newly created area studies in the ’50s and ’60s, the United States, of course, was not included as an area; neither were the societies of Western Europe. In reproducing the Eurocentricity of the modern world, the discipline of area studies copied the spatial structure of the modern world and embodied the division of labor according to which those who studied areas were positioned in the West, and those who were studied were allocated in what Stuart Hall called “the Rest” in “the discourse of the West and the Rest.” In other words, the term “area” signified the positionality of a person exposed to some other person’s gaze without looking or gazing back at the person: being assigned to an area, you are exposed to somebody else’s gaze while you are prohibited from returning it. In this respect, the institutional constitution of an area mimicked the very essence of the colonial power arrangement.
The question is not simply a matter of fairness or equality. What is at stake is that, in the disciplinary formation of area studies, an institutionalized discriminatory practice was regimented. It was not merely the fact that the epistemic structure of area studies served to reproduce the discourse of colonial/racial discrimination practiced for some time in many parts of the world; it has sustained and continued to reproduce the spatial structure of the modern world under the political climate of the Cold War.
It was not only countries in North America that could never be an object of study in the discipline of area studies. Neither were those societies in Western Europe that were postulated as areas. Accordingly, neither the United Kingdom nor France was an area in area studies, even though Europe too was initially proposed to be areas in the Social Science Research Council proposal.
Interestingly enough, however, countries in Eastern Europe could be areas. Of course, the Soviet Union constituted a prominent area in area studies programs. Hence, the discipline of area studies contained a certain strategy of allocation according to which populations were classified, primarily, between those not allocated in any area and those who were objects of study in areas. But, secondarily, the same strategy worked to further differentiate among so-called white people who were somewhat regarded as “originally European”; yet some of them were more authentically “European” than those Europeans located in the peripheries (the East and South) of Europe. The distinction of West Europeans from East and South Europeans functioned in the institutional allocation of areas in the disciplinary configuration of humanistic and social sciences.
In the 1980s, I was invited to join the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell. Comparative literature was established in the early 20th century as a discipline in which European literatures were to be compared: one European literature, national literature, was compared with another. That’s how the comparative literature field itself was created at that time. Literature in China or literature in Africa or literature in Latin America was not considered for comparison. This is to say that the discipline of comparative literature did not include expertise on such languages as Chinese, Arabic and Swahili until the 1980s, even though it was specialized in the comparison of literary practices in multiple languages. It was presumed that literature was something inherently European.
If you pursue more rigorously the various classification paradigms of geographic regions, civilizations, races, nationalities, languages, religious affiliations and so forth that operate in the discipline of area studies, sooner or later, you will realize how inconsistent and mutually contradictory those classificatory categories are. The racial classification does not coincide with the distinction and categorization of areas; neither can you find a coherence among a list of civilizations, cultures and so forth. Nevertheless, it is generally believed that the binary of the West and the Rest somewhat serves to summarily put together the variety of classifications operating for humankind. Thus, area studies programs adhere to the epistemic division of labor according to which the West is given the positionality of the subject of knowledge, and each area as an object gazed at by the West. This viewing of the Rest of the world is sustained in the discipline of area studies even when an increasing portion of area experts are originally from the Rest. The spatial structure inherent in area studies must now be really reconsidered and transformed. At the same time, I must confess, this is not an easy task.
HK: Speaking of this structure, I currently teach in Europe, and when I tell someone that I teach at Leiden University, most assume that I teach language. I think this says a lot about the presumption about the division of labor, who gets to theorize, who is the native informant, etc. It creates a dissonance because I disturb the traditional relationship between the knower and the known. You started teaching much earlier in Chicago, how was it like back then?
NS: At Chicago, when, as a graduate student, I first attended classes on area studies in the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations, very often I was the only one from Asia among say something like twenty students in a class or seminar. Hence there was a tendency to treat me as a sort of native informant if teachers were not enlightened or critically reflective. Since I was much more geared towards theoretical argument, many of my teachers and classmates were probably puzzled; they could not classify me according to the institutionalized system of classification inherent in area studies. When I participated in graduate classes at Chicago, I was relatively more familiar with European, American and Japanese philosophy than the majority of students. It was difficult to treat me as a typical student from Asia knowing little about Euro-American theories, but that’s the only way to resist the prevalent Eurocentricity inherent in area studies.
That tendency continued when I started teaching at Chicago first and later at Cornell. Precisely because I read European philosophical and theoretical texts together with some theoretical texts by intellectuals from Asia in my courses, some of the best students such as William Haver, Jon Solomon, Setsu Shigematsu, Gavin Walker, Takeshi Kimoto, Pedro Elber, Xiangjing Chen and so forth, who now constitute a critical voice in the disciplines of area studies came to study with me.
It was more than four decades ago when I began to teach, so many changes have taken place since then. No doubt area studies programs have undergone many transformations. Yet, some basic structure concerning the epistemic division of labor is still detectable. You can find the same problem, so obvious in area studies, also in other disciplines such as English literature, comparative literature, and of course, anthropology and sociology. But social sciences have been much more responsive to change. Today social scientists would never openly say social sciences are for European humanities. Yet we have not overcome that structure in the Humanities, it seems.
I am afraid that the persistence of the West-and-the-Rest binary is not limited to area studies, the Humanities, or to the US higher education at large. This is a much broader problem which I have been trying to address in terms of “the dislocation of the West.” The White Nationalist movement in the US, for instance, is an unfortunate testimony to the persistence of the bi-polarity of modernity. What we are facing in the United States as well as some countries in Europe is the problem of how to go beyond the bi-polarity/bi-polarities of modernity (the West-and-the-Rest bi-polarity) in our knowledge production. Must we refuse to overlook the very situation where anxiety arises from that old categorization of humanity precisely because the old fantasy of the West can in no way be ascertained?
HK: Yes, and especially given the attack on higher education about critical race theory and how to even teach US history, there is the anxiety as you mention.
NS: A lot of people are aware that the attack on higher education had a lot to do with the repressed history of American settler colonialism. Until recently, the majority of the American public has avoided talking about colonialism publicly and openly. That’s such a fundamental fact about the United States of America and its history.
HK: I have one last question. In terms of when you started talking and critiquing about area studies, how was the reception of what you did in Japan?
NS: Thank you for a very significant question. We would not be able to end this interview without confronting this question.
Generally speaking, scholars in Japan working in the discipline of Japanese literature, Japanese history and Japanese ethnology and so forth, were rather indifferent although there were a small number of people who were seriously concerned with the bi-polarity of modernity. Even today, however, most Japanese intellectuals do not seem interested in what I am doing, even though, I think, many intellectuals, not only in Japan but in many societies as well in Asia, are in fact aware that they are implicated in Eurocentrism. The majority of scholars working in Japan presume that the uniqueness of Japanese culture is, somehow, not appreciated. Of course, every culture is unique, just as every person is unique. But, what they imply by the uniqueness of Japan is that Japanese culture is not evaluated in contrast to the so-called Euro-American culture of the West. On the one hand, they feel obligated to be assimilated into the West; modernization means becoming more like Westerners. On the other hand, they are different and should never be assimilated there. This ambiguous attitude is characteristic of what I call “civilizational transference.” It seems that they have not liberated themselves from the incentive of “Leaving Asia and Joining Europe” (脱亜入欧), the motto under which Japan’s modernization was promoted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That is a reproduction of a colonial epistemology. And they face this problem most acutely when they deal with the question of theory. Nowadays scholars are much less obsessed with the motto of “Leaving Asia and Joining Europe” in natural and social sciences. As a matter of fact, some societies are more productive in scientific and technological knowledge. In the Humanities, however, quite a few intellectuals still appeal to the idea of “Western theory.” They obstinately assume that so-called theory is monopolized by the West. Yet, we no longer know what the West is, where it is, or who Westerners are.
What they have to do is to engage in a critical examination of the framework of knowledge production. We no longer accept such old views of European tradition as used to be upheld by such philosophers as Hegel, Husserl or Habermas; neither can we adhere to their idea of “European Humanity” whose mission was the endless pursuit of universal theory. Hence you do not really have to consult “Westerners” to borrow theories from European Humanity. Instead, you have to be involved in a critical and theoretical re-evaluation of knowledge in the Humanities as well. As far as theory is concerned, there is no point in emphasizing civilization or identity. Theory must involve an interaction between different social contexts, and this task is essential to effectively criticize the epistemic division of labor in the discipline of area studies.
It is in this sense that I argue Asian intellectuals are equally implicated in Eurocentrism. They are contributing to Eurocentrism instead of destroying it. This is one of the most important aspects in the critique of area studies today.
HK: Thank you, this talk has been helpful to contextualize what is happening to area studies under the current political climate.
NS: I think it is in a sense predictable. For a large portion of the American population, the whole differentiation between the West and the Rest was so fundamental for their self-esteem which used to be built upon this kind of Eurocentric bipolarity, or what Stuart Hall called “the discourse of the West and the Rest.”
But this spatial structure is now collapsing, which gives rise to a tremendous anxiety in a certain portion of American population. This sense of insecurity observable in the US mass media is, I think, somewhat comparable to what happened in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. I witnessed a similar thing happening in the 1970s and ’80s in the United Kingdom. It was called the “loss of empire” in British Cultural Studies. And that loss of empire brought tremendous anxiety to those people who used to regard themselves as colonizers, as a social group who believed itself endowed with a natural superiority to the colonized.
You may be too young to remember that, in Japan, the most typical reaction to the loss of empire was observed in the dispute over the “comfort women” problem in the 1990s. At that time some reactionary activists tried hard to censor the description of Japanese colonial violence in high-school history textbooks. And, when you look at the situation in the US today, you find their reaction so similar in many respects to the Japanese Society for New National History Writing.
In order to analyze this problem of interaction between former colonizers and former colonized, I introduced the term, “civilizational transference,” as I mentioned earlier. It depicts the working of a regime: it’s a conceptual tool by which to apprehend the mechanism of self-orientalization on the part of Asian intellectuals, as well as the fantastic assertion of colonizer status on the part of Western intellectuals. It is “transference” because it happens as a supplementary mutuality between the former colonized and the former colonizers. Today, a naked colonial violence cannot be used, so modern colonialism dominates in cultural discourse, and fascism arises in many parts of the world in order to assert the epistemic division of labor, which we have been talking about in this interview.
HK: So that is your current project?
NS: Well, for several years, I have been writing a book tentatively entitled Dislocation of the West because the West is no longer either a determined location, a civilizational identity, or the center of scientific and theoretical rationality. It used to be geographically ascribed to the image of a certain part of Eurasia and then North America, but I don’t think it’s possible nowadays to determine where the West is located. Neither can we continue to presume that a certain kind of people, who used to be called “the European humanity,” are better endowed with rationality. It has been increasingly evident that the old hierarchy of the First, Second and Third Worlds—partly because the Second World collapsed in 1989—or the developmental narrative of modernization has been discredited. This is to say, we can no longer say North America is the First World while societies in Africa are of the Third. Instead, we probably have to admit that a certain part of North America may be in the First World, but that huge portion of North America belongs to the Third World. Some people refer to the idiom “multi-polar world” to describe this reality now. We really have to confront this reality.
HK: We no longer have a clear East or West anymore.
NS: No, and this is why we really have to re-constitute the discipline of area studies.
[10-11 pm, October 31, 2025]
AUTHORS
Hitomi Koyama is a university lecturer at the Institute of Area Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands. Hitomi Koyama is an international relations theorist working at the intersection of comparative political theory, global intellectual history, and discourses Asianism in Japanese international political thought. Her first book, On the Persistence of the Japanese History Problem: Historicism and the International Politics of History (Routledge, 2018) asks why postwar Japanese society remains caught in an impasse over atonement for its imperialist past. Her second book, tentatively titled Pacific Dementia: Japanese International Political Thought Under Pax Americana, investigates the epithet “peace dementia” [heiwa boke]—which suggests the Japanese people have become demented because of peace brought under the aegis of American protection—to what it reveals about the history of realist thought of a semi-sovereign Japan.
Naoki Sakai is a Distinguished Professor of Asian Studies Emeritus at the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University, USA. Naoki Sakai teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies and is a member of the graduate field of History at Cornell University. He has published in a number of languages in the fields of comparative literature, intellectual history, translation studies, the studies of racism and nationalism, and the histories of semiotic and literary multitude—speech, writing, corporeal expressions, calligraphic regimes, and phonographic traditions. He has led the project of TRACES, a multilingual series in four languages—Korean, Chinese, English, and Japanese (German, Italian, and Spanish will be added in 2008)—whose editorial office is located at Cornell, and served as its founding senior editor (1996-2004). In addition to TRACES, Naoki Sakai serves as a member of the following editorial boards, positions: east asia cultures critique (the United States), Postcolonial Studies (Australia), Tamkang Review (Taiwan), International Dictionary of Intellectual History (Britain and Germany), Modern Japanese Cultural History (Japan), ASPECTS (South Korea), and Multitudes (France).