Reconsidering Orientalism/Occidentalism: representations of a Japanese martial art in Melbourne
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My research analysed a small Melbourne community of non-Japanese practitioners of a Japanese martial art (kend), and I focused on their understanding of their practice, of their community, and of Japan and Japanese culture.In particular, I focused on the way non-Japanese practitioners represent a practice of the Other and the way they interact with that otherness.More specifically, three key points are suggested in my research.(1) While Orientalist stereotypes locate the Other from the spectator's objective perspective, I would suggest the way Melbourne kend practitioners interact with the Other is through a process of creating 'familiarity'; locating oneself within surrounding differences and building subjective involvement into a practice of the Other.Such subjective involvement is further emphasised by their preference towards 'something new' and 'something different'.By selecting kend as a thing to 'add' to their everyday life, they structure this everyday life by appropriating a new phenomenon as an activity to make their life enjoyable.(2) Through participating in this practice of the Other, Melbourne practitioners recognise kend as a form for 'expressing the self', 'developing the self', and 'challenging the self'.Kend practice provides them a space to explore a different self which is somehow restricted in daily life.In contrast to Orientalist representations which seek 'authentic otherness', Melbourne practitioners are interested in self cultivation in which they seek a sense of the authentic moment of expressing their being 'here and now' through finding alternative belongingness in the kend community.(3) The practitioners' subjective involvement is further complicated by their recognition of themselves.The narratives of some practitioners show the way they interact with the Japanese Other by building the eyes to see themselves from the perspective of the Japanese Other, and thus they have a 'two-way' interaction in which their identities as kend practitioners are constantly challenged, reflecting their foreign position among a minority of Japanese practitioners.In other words, their identities as kend practitioners traverse the borderline between the Self and the Other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".