From the Nation to the World, from National Culture to Cultural Networks. An Analysis of Javier Sinay’s, Julián Varsavsky’s and Fernando Krapp’s Travel Accounts about Japan

Abstract

The present study analyzes three books published in 2019, all of which refer to Japan’s symbolic universe: Javier Sinay’s Camino al este, Julián Varsavsky’s Japón desde una cápsula, and Fernando Krapp’s Una isla artificial. The focus of analysis is the way in which these travel writers depict Japan and their journey through this country (and in the case of Krapp, his journey within the Japanese community in Argentina). Strong emphasis is placed on the way in which Japan is interpreted as part of a bigger system that comprises the writers themselves as Argentinians. In the case of Sinay, that bigger framework is love, understood as a feeling shared by all human kind and capable of traversing frontiers. In the case of Varsavsky, said framework is a dystopian vision of Capitalism, in which Japan is the most developed example of dehumanization. In the case of Krapp, the only one of the three travelers whose book is not centered around a voyage to Japan, such general framework is the idea that all identity is a construction, that is, something beyond national and local determinations and roots. The study will try to show that, while building up a bigger system or universe of which Japan, Argentina, and other countries of the world are part, these three travel writers advocate for the dissolution of the very idea of the ‘nation’.