pproach is still essentially imperialist in its concern with the appropriation of bits and pieces of Asian culture and bringing “the spoils” home to enhance Western culture as can be seen in the poem “Epilogue”: “I bring you the spoils, my nation, / I, who went out in exile, / Am returned to thee with gifts.”
What makes Pound’s appropriation of “exotic” elements of Japanese culture not only Orientalist, but ultimately (though no surprisingly) Fascist, is his refusal to see Japan’s culture in the context of real social and historical processes. The desire to find an ideal beauty and cultural template that is unchanging, standing outside time. The actual reality of Japan’s contemporary society during the entire time Pound was establishing his Asian formula was one of intensive modernization and industrialization, and it is within this context that Japanese poets produced work which responded to the conditions of their own time, conditions which, in actual fact, were not much different than those in European countries.
Japan was completely modernized by early in the 20th century and had an economy based on heavy industry by the WWI era. Scholars now view Japan’s modernity as having been “coeval” with that of the West, rather than less advanced or less complete and attempting to catch up. Japanese poets during the Modernist period engaged in intensive correspondence with European intellectuals such as Breton, Marinetti, and Ezra Pound, and initiated their own local versions and interpretations (not imitations) of all of the contemporary avant-garde movements, including Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. In the high-paced urban environment of 1920s Japan, you could listen to Jazz at places like the Zebra club in Kobe or the Blackbird in Tokyo. A newly affluent middle class dressed in the latest fashions and engaged in “Ginbura” (strolling along the Ginza) purchasing imported luxury products. There were flourishing avant-garde art movements such as MAVO, and active revolutionary Marxist and anarchist movements. By the 1930s Kitasono Katue was developing what he referred to as “abstract poetry” which would lead to his later “plastic poems.” Nishiwaki Junzaburo, one of the founders of the Modernist magazine Poetry and Poetics (Shi to Shiron), was developing a poetics of translation, appropriation and allusion which rejected the idea that poetry should have anything to do with “communication.” His theories still resonate with more recent experimental movements in both Japan and the United States. Japanese poets during the Modernist period, nearly all of whom were translators and theorists, formed an intensely cosmopolitan society familiar with all the latest intellectual trends in Europe, a society which included intellectual women such as Sagawa Chika, surrealist poet and translator of Gertrude Stein, who bore little resemblance to Western stereotypes.
It is somewhat ironic that amongst Pound’s correspondents of the time were major avant-gardists such as Kitasono Katue. In other words, Pound was well aware of the interests most common among Japanese poets of the time, and yet he chose to write about and popularize his sense of the classic, the ancient, and the ideal (interests shared with Fascist thinkers).
During the Cold War the U.S. government needed to change public attitudes produced by wartime propaganda and cultivate positive feelings about Japan, which had become the cornerstone of its anti-Soviet defense strategy in Asia. It was during this time that images of Japan as a place of mystery and exotic beauty began entering the middle class American consciousness in the form of movies, novels and travel articles in popular magazines. The Zen boom took off with the publication of Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen in 1957. The figure of the Geisha became a central theme in the imaging of Japan at this time. The metaphor of the passive feminine serving the dominant male was useful as a means of both explaining and rationalizing American hegemony in Japan and the rest of Asia. Although this new form of American Orientalism generally t