From popular culture flows to movements of peoples, from circulation of commodities to consumer patterns, there seems to be an unprecedented trafficking, sense of confidence and coevalness among countries in northeastern Asia that could be characterized as the dawning of an “Asian modern.” Economic competition and political disputes notwithstanding, cultural integration—buoyed by unabating consumerism and mass culture—has made Okakura Kakuzō's early twentieth-century dictum, “Asia is one,” a seeming probability today. This inter-Asian transculturation, unimaginable twenty years ago, is symptomatic of global capitalism in its incessant search for new markets and capital's continued need for valorization. If current cultural transformation within northeastern Asia corresponds to the latest logic of Empire (in the Hardt and Negri sense), Karen Thornber's book reminds us of an earlier regional exchange during the time of imperialist competitions: the Japanese empire.
Deploying the concept of transculturation, which unfolds in the text as processes of textual translation, adaptation,...