Empires éloignés. L'Europe et le Japon (XVIe-XIXe siècle)

The three centuries between the arrival of the first Westerners in Japan in 1543 and the reopening of the country in 1853 point at the same time to the final stop of the first globalization achieved by the Portuguese and Spanish empires and to the encounter between cultures that had lived in a blissful ignorance of each other. The conflict between Christianity and Buddhism, but also shifting national policies and the rapid eviction of Western foreigners (apart from a small community of Dutch people) fostered a new version of connected histories represented in books, in works of art, in popular fictions and in religious controversies. Today it is no longer possible to analyze these three hundred years of dialogue and hostility, of successes and failures when Japan redefined its place in East Asia while relying only the nearsightedness of Japanese studies and on researches about Western empires and their colonial expansion in Asia. By a constant interplay of inverted mirrors, participants on both sides of the divide marking those first cultural encounters started to represent the ‘Other’, thereby making a first step towards self-definition. Contributions reflect this variety of methods but also the diversity of the people who used them. In this volume, Japanese and Western specialists in the field of cultural exchange bring back to life the whole array of these early modern diplomacies based on reality and on imagination, of these cultural mediations that were to leave indelible traces.