Nahum Dimitri Chandler

Introduction: On the Virtues of Seeing—At Least, But Never Only—Double

In the title for this special issue, Toward a New Parallax: Or, Japan—in Another Traversal of the Trans-Pacific, the name “Japan” could be placed inside quotation marks. For, in a word, the essays in this volume purport to question the sense of Japan that would already have been known. Th ey may also be understood to do so in a distinct manner. As an epistemic matter—although its possibility might in the past have seemed obscure for some, such is no longer the case—this issue has its first incipit in the occurrence of a question from the work of W. E. B. Du Bois about the place of Japan in modern history. Across more than half a century—from the late 1890s through the late 1950s, in essence the whole of the perduring itinerary from the inception of Du Bois’s intellectual maturity—references to Japan comprise a persistent and densely interwoven strand in his thought. Th e question in its most distilled form can be stated quite simply, even if in a somewhat fulsome manner. In the wake of the centuries-long eventuality of