Overcoming Inferiority through the Past-Orientalisation and the Present-Occidentalisation

Abstract

This article examines the erasure of Japan’s premodern homosexual culture, known as nanshoku, through the lens of Orientalism. It argues that the decline of nanshoku through Japan’s westernisation following the Meiji Restoration (1868) entailed a process of "past-Orientalisation" and "present-Occidentalisation." While Edward Said theorised Orientalism as a Western discourse that subjugates the "Orient," this study extends his framework to analyse how Japan internalised Orientalist logic to distanse itself from its own past. By historicising its own sexual past as an "Othered" element belonging to an inferior “Orient” (“past-Orientalisation”), Meiji Japan sought to align itself with the dominant Western cultural and ideological framework ("present-Occidentalisation"). Drawing on the discourse of Orientalism and expanding its application to Japan’s internalisation of Oriental inferiority, this study explores how Japan’s restructuring of its sexual norms was not merely a process of westernising the past norms but a subjective redefinition of its own identity. This article further contends that this pattern persists in contemporary Japanese society, where discourses on gender and sexuality essentialise Western paradigms. By illustrating how Japan’s internalisation of Western ideology contributed to the persistent suppression of its cultural autonomy over sexuality, this article contributes to the discourse on how societies in the non-West have shaped modernity under the enduring legacy of Orientalist frameworks.