Tra esotismo ed eroismo. Bartolomeo Balbi e lo sviluppo dell’immagine del Giappone in Italia durante la prima metà del Novecento

Bartolomeo Balbi (1874-1961) was an Italian army officer and japanologist, who served as an attaché at the Italian Embassy in Tokyo, taught Japanese language at the University of Naples, and started a publishing house that issued several fiction and non-fiction books on Japan from the 1910s to the 1950s – among them, the novels of the pseudo-Japanese author Myū Tsubaki, pen name of the Italian writer Attilia Pozzi (1876-1938). This essay reconstructs Balbi’s life and publishing activity, exploring the structure and functioning of Japanese studies in the first half of the 20th century, and the transformations of the West’s exotic and heroic image of Japan in the 1905-45 period.