Mostri made in Japan. Orientalismo e auto-Orientalismo nell'epoca della globalizzazione

Since the release of the pioneering film Gojira, monsters made in Japan have not only reached a prominent status in the international Hall of Fame of modern monsters, but are also becoming a major trademark of ‘Japanese culture’, or, rather, of its contemporary and more popular version: ‘J-culture’. In Japan itself, the proliferation and success of new monsters represent only one facet of the growing enthusiasm for spiritual traditions, mysticism and the ‘other-world’ (ikai), inhabited by an even larger population of old monsters (yōkai, bakemono, yūrei). Government sponsored research projects, national museum exhibitions and academic books are all bestowing institutional approval on ‘monsterology’ (yōkaigaku) and, indirectly, on popular fascination with the supernatural dimensions of national roots and culture. This paper will explore the success of Japanese monsters in the context of the complex relationships between external Euro-American perspectives and internal Japanese ones. Despite different orientations, towards the definition of alterity (orientalism) on the one hand, and of identity (self-orientalism) on the other, the reciprocity and complicity of these two perspectives has proven strategic in modern nihonjinron rhetoric, when influentialEuro-American and Japanese actors both played a kind of mirror-game by articulating and mutually reflecting the myth of an essentialized and unique ‘Japanese culture’. The emergence of monsters as one trademark of ‘J-culture’ offers the opportunity to verify the (dis)continuity with previous discourses by addressing the metaphorical aspects of monstrosity, with its connotations of ambivalence, hybridism, excess, and its potential to articulate a post-modern version of the mirror-game more suited to the new dynamics of globalization.