Ghosts in the Shell: On South Africa,the USA and Japan

This article surveys American literary responses to the rise of Japan as an economic power during the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and examines how these responses were anticipated in the writings of the South African author Laurens van der Post. Paying particular attention to van der Post’s autobiography, Yet Being Someone Other (1982), I suggest that the author’s formative experiences aboard a Japanese trading vessel in 1926, coupled with South Africa’s close-knit trading relationship with Japan in the 1980s, enabled a perspective on Japan’s economic ascendancy that was markedly less reactionary than those in the USA. By emphasizing the historical contexts that held true at the time of publication, I situate Yet Being Someone Other in a framework that deliberately circumvents—without necessarily confronting—van der Post’s preferred version of his life story. Rather than “recovering” the author’s ‘place in the canon of South African literature, this article is intended to incorporate the author’s work into ongoing discussions of the representation of Japan and the Japanese in twentieth-century Anglophone writings.