In Japan, just as elsewhere, higher education has been undergoing a rapid change, seeking to identify the role of research, knowledge production, and pedagogy. Among manifold propensities to reorganise the academy, this paper focuses specifically on the increasing interest in kokusai nihon gaku (international Japanese studies) and subsequent establishment of a number of educational programs and research centres under the aegis thereof, aiming at exploring, not its socio-political and socio-economic location against the backdrop of internationalisation of Japanese universities, but its epistemological presumptions that determine the location of ‘Japan’ as the object of knowledge.

Not to mention its seeming novelty and its interdisciplinary heterogeneous nature, the difficulty of defining this new scholarly development derives from its very naming: ‘international’ and ‘Japanese studies’ seem to occupy respectively a very different end of a spectrum. On the one hand, ‘international’ suggests not something beyond the nation state, but rather something that dialectically feeds back to a form of nationalism in the age of globalisation, and thus a form of pedagogical knowledge that objectifies ‘Japan’ as a historical object of a pedagogy for self-generation.

Yet, on the other hand, ‘Japanese studies’ denotes the conventional schemata of area studies, which produces significations of cultural differences, or else performative knowledge that differentiates self, distinct from the other. Understanding thus, this paper argues that kokusai nihon gaku creates a space of liminality between the pedagogical and the performative, wherein ‘Japan’ becomes the site of self-objectification without ever quite abolishing itself as the subject.