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Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern. Edited by DONALD DENOON, MARK HUDSON, GAVAN MCCORMACK, and TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. viii, 296 pp. $59.95.
This volume presents an uncompromising interdisciplinary attack on the Japanese "ideology of 'uniqueness' and 'monoculturalism"' (p. 3). As such it will be of considerable interest for all scholars whose work involves issues of Japanese cultural distinctiveness. The book itself is a model of international scholarly cooperation, with several chapters appearing as translations from Japanese of work that would otherwise be unavailable outside of Japan. The major strength of this volume is its pursuit of the single theme of critical approaches to claims of Japanese distinctiveness across several disciplines. This single-mindedness, however, also reveals some limitations of the approach.
The first of the book's five sections attacks archeological myths of Japanese identity in two ways. The first two essays, those of Katayama Kazumichi and John Maher, challenge the facts behind alleged myths of origin of the Japanese people and the Japanese language respectively. Both of these articles provide authoritative summaries of technical literatures, but may be somewhat opaque to nonspecialists. The next two essays critique the contemporary use of archeology. Simon Kaner argues that many kinds of cultural diversity are discovered through archeological attention to...