From the migrant care-workers arriving in Japan from the Philippines and Indonesia to support the depleted social support system for the large population of the elderly (Ogawa 2012) to the increasing number of retiring Japanese embarking on long-stay tourism in Malaysia (Ono 2015), the Japanese image of Southeast Asia as an exotic destination offering cheap labor in return for official development assistance seems to be fading away. Yet these changes are not necessarily reflected in the way contemporary Japanese, especially those who belong to the global, “spiritual-but not-religious” (Fuller 2001) population, think of and “consume” Southeast Asia in their daily lives. Using three case-studies, spiritual tours, Thai massage, and an NGO founded by a Japanese spiritual therapist, this paper argues that in Japan’s large spiritual market, which targets people seeking alternative ways to express their religiosity, the old-fashioned colonial exoticism of Southeast Asian narratives were integrated in a totalizing discourse, in which Japan remains the exceptional outlier (Tanaka 1993), a country still claimed to be “advanced” both spiritually and economically.
목차
Abstract Ⅰ. Introduction Ⅱ. Japanese view of Southeast Asia: poor, exotic…and spiritual? Ⅲ. Orientalization of orientalism and the psychologization of Thai massage Ⅳ. Teaching “proper” religion through “spiritual” means : a spiritual therapist in development work Ⅴ. Orientalists on orientalism References
본 연구소는 아시아 지역 및 관련 국가의 정치, 경제, 사회, 역사, 문화, 언어등에 관하여 지역연구 방법론을 통한 학제적 연구에 그 목적을 두고 아시아 각 지역의 최신 정보 및 자료의 수집, 정리, 분석, 제공에 중점을 둔다. 이와 관련하여 국내외 대학 및 연구기관과의 학술교류에 주력하여 지역연구부문 최고의 중점 연구소로의 성장을 목표로 한다.