Abstracts of the conference “Language.Literature.Politics. 1918–2018. (Un)doing Nationalism and Resistance” The Role of Language in the Definition of National Character: A Case Study of Identity Discourse in Contemporary Japan Elisa Vitali * This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) Abstract After the defeat in WWII the Japanese experienced a twenty-year period of identity cri- sis in which they searched for a new ideology that could enable them to face the threat of “spiritual vacuum” (Befu 2001), economic instability and strong criticisms from the West. In such a chaotic environment the identity discourse known as Nihonjinron (Theories on the Japanese) flourished and became hegemonic. Nihonjinron success- fully dominates the Japanese panorama even now, thanks to the influence of academic and popular literature, mass media, a powerful cultural industry, politics, and a national, genuine interest for the “Japaneseness”. The discussion on the alleged Japanese unique- ness, that is, the existence of unbridgeable racial and cultural differences between the ‘Japanese’ and the ‘Other’ – the West – is precisely the core of Nihonjinron. As Dale (1986), Befu, Sugimoto (1986) and Yoshino (1992) argue, the underlying assumptions of Nihonjinron could be summed up as follows: a racial and cultural homogeneity of Japanese people; a conceptual equation between Nation/Race/Ethnicity/Language/Cul- ture/Blood considered as monolithic, natural features, that is, a primordialist or essen- tialist perspective (Eriksen 2010, Geertz 1963); a “race thinking” or racialism; a belief in the validity of emic judgments only over etic analyses on Japaneseness and ethno- centrism. The historical roots of the Nihonjinron phenomenon can be traced back to the Meiji period (1868–1912), when the first theories on the origins of the Japanese na- tion emerged in reaction to the shocking encounter with the West and the introduction of Western science (Oguma 2002). Interestingly, the myth of a homogeneous, pure- blooded state-nation coexisted from its birth with another typology of nationalism, the so called ‘mixed nation theory’. This theory prevailed during the Taish¯ o (1912–1926) and part of the Sh¯ owa (1926–1989) periods until the 1945 defeat, serving as the basis of the multinational paradigm of the imperialistic and expansionistic ideology and as * University of Milan, Italy 198