 In Japan, certain retroactive constructions of identity and reactive counter-assertions of superiority have taken the form of what is called nihonjin-ron: theories of “Japaneseness” or “Japanese uniqueness” (see Dale 1986). In modern Japanese history, such reactive cultural self-obsession and self-assertion has taken either the form of denying Japan’s deep-rooted traditional connections with its East Asian neighbors, or the form of claiming that Japan has uniquely embodied and perfected “the essence of the East.” If the former type of claim is most in evidence in postwar and contemporary Japan, the latter is found, for example, in the Meiji thinker Okakura Tenshin’s declaration that, while “Asia is one,” Japan alone is “the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture” (Okakura 2000, 1 and 5).