Japan as we see it

...In fact, the inclusion of a few more of these early encounters might have been desirable...

...Ian Littlewood, in The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths, sets out to expose our time-honored myths about that country, not because they are untrue, but because they obscure "all the other things that are true...

...the two are not the same...

...It is far from obvious that we are more distorted in our views of the Japanese than we are in our views of, say, the Arabs, or the Latin Americans, or even our own American Indians...

...Whatever else he has done, Littlewood has given us an intriguing analysis of popular references to a country of enormous importance to us...

...He calls for more Western-to-Eastern contact, which most of us would probably accept, even if we would reject his historical diagnosis...

...Littlewood makes no attempt to demonstrate that Western-created images of Japanese seductresses and martial artists differ significantly from those in Japanese media, as his thesis might seem to require...

...Japan, he contends, has grown too important to be ringed in cliches...

...And Littlewood, though he suggests it, never quite proves that our perceptions of Japan are less accurate than our perceptions of other cultures...

...we have only her arrival in port, which is rather like emphasizing the experience of Lewis and Clark east of the Blue Ridge...

...That, ladies and gentlemen, is a strong response...

...Because Little-wood argues that popular culture is more revealing of our attitudes than scholarly literature, it is a bit surprising that he left out Oliver Statler's influential Japanese Inn...

...True, the Japanese do not refer to themselves as "monkeys," as Western propagandists did during World War II, but Tanizaki and Kawabata write of the pleasures of young Japanese women, Mishima is at least as interested in sensuality and suicide as any Western writer mentioned by Littlewood, and Japanese movies depict both sword-wielding heroes and villains...

...Nor are these stereotypes necessarily valueless, he says...

...The preponderant strength of the book lies in its references to popular Western literature...

...The Idea of Japan is an enjoyable and readable volume...

...For example, in recounting Japan's 200-year effort to exclude Western influence, Littlewood tells the story of the summary execution of a Portuguese trade delegation in 1640: They were executed to a man, along with all but thirteen members of Lewis Libby, a Washington lawyer and a former official in the State and Defense departments, is the author of The Apprentice, a first novel...

...Many of the familiar names are here, but we have too little of, for example, Isabella Bird's travels through northern Japan in 1878...

...Also, he might have commented on the impressions left on Westerners by Japanese works that are at least as well known in our culture as many of the Western works he cites: Filtered into the Western consciousness about Japan are the films of Akira Kurosawa and the writings of Yukio Mishima, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Yasunari Kawabata (who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1968...

...The book resembles a Japanese sketch, in which the artist paints only portions of the canvas, leaving whole realms covered by clouds...

...Perhaps one day he will address more directly some of the questions he has raised...

...as if we were no longer in the world...

...These thirteen, witnesses to the execution, were sent back with a message to the Macanese, "Let the people of Macao think no more of us...

...Little-wood's subtitle, "Western Images, Western Myths," might better be styled, "Images and Myths in Western-created Popular Media...

...As we consider all of the spy novels, murder mysteries, and the like, we have to wonder whether Littlewood is to some extent putting the rabbit in the hat...

...Do we, as he implicitly asserts, truly perceive characters in such settings as broadly reflective of real people...

...At the end of the book, Little-wood invokes World War II and the atomic bombing of Japan to warn that if we do not challenge our historical stereotypes of the Japanese, "the same stereotypes will sooner or later produce the same reaction...

...They persist "because there is a basis of truth to them...

...It is incomplete—What is the true Japan, any-way?—but to be incomplete is not to be without merit...

...In Ian Fleming's Bond novels, James Clavell's Shogun, Michael Crich-ton's Rising Sun, Fred Hiatt's The Secret Sun, and other works, Little-wood finds evidence of Western fantasies about Japanese women, Japanese aestheticism, Japanese violence, and—most disturbingly—Japanese otherness, the sense that the Japanese are alien, less than fully human...

...Littlewood does not pretend to tell us what Japan is really like...

...the crew...

...A similar survey of pulp novels and movies involving these other groups might show equally egregious, or even more egregious, stereotypes...

...So, he has put together an exhibition of perceptions of Japan, from the earliest Western visitors' accounts to James Bond and the ninja flicks...

...Popular culture is meaningful, but there is also common sense in the populace—along with understanding and tolerance...

...In the meantime, we are left to ponder the meaning of the stereotypes he has carefully exposed...

...There is many a gem here...

...rather, he wants us to know how readily and consistently we engage in stereotypes about it...