Introduction to special issue on imagination and the real

I am grateful to the editors for the opportunity to introduce this special issue, ‘Imagination and the Real’, highlighting work emerging from UCLA’s recent graduates. The fact that this collection is featured in the Japan Forum of course allows these authors to address a community of scholars from a variety of fields and points of interest, all invested in their scholarly practices with the conviction that events, lifeways, creations, practices, and transformations within this archipelago merit our careful considerations, and can yield compelling, broad and diverse forms of knowledge about social realities then and now. This is a readership that frequently takes a necessarily interdisciplinary approach to such investigations in their own work, or at the very least is open to readings beyond narrow disciplinary bounds. Japan Forum speaks in this way to the Japan-focused scholarly communities represented by BAJS, EAJS, and other groups representing a kind of meta-field of work all connected in and through ‘Japan’. This meta-field has gone through numerous transformations over the years, reflecting on the nature and organization of our work in dialog with other scholarly practices, as well as in consideration of our eventful times. In particular, our work and its stakes have long moved past the reductive formulations of cultural uniqueness mobilized by imperial and nationalist pedagogies, or by the backhanded tutelary constructions of Modernization Theory and its explanations of ‘success’ through cultural endowments. Our fields of inquiry can recognize that the importance of our investigations is rather more than the detailing of the singular history of some substantialized entity, Japan, the proper noun reducing all acts and events within its borders to ‘its’ incommensurable and special life story. Our investigations each necessarily manifest a critical project, organized by a reflexive relation to the subjects of our investigations.