The Confrontation Between Japanese and American Worlds

This paper places the historical events pertaining to the initial encounters between Japanese and Americans within the context of Western science and colonialism. In the first two chapters, concepts of religion and universalism, nature and culture and the idea of objective scientific method as inseparable from their historical contexts and from colonial and neo-colonial worldmaking. The third chapter presents Japan as a construct of late-Tokugawa modernizing efforts, whilst the fourth focuses on America as a Christian and imperialist project. The remaining chapters then look at the encounters between the two worlds themselves, first with emphasis on the Japanese and later on the American side. By introducing the encounters within the established contexts, this paper stresses the need to approach the confrontation not just as happening between the complex American and Japanese onto-epistemologies, but also with Western scientific method as a participant that is not exempt from its own historic and material conditions and limitations