Introduction “Piracy and the Jigsaw Puzzle Without a Piece,”
Shigemi Inaga ed., The 50th International Research Symposium:
A Pirate's View of World History―A Reversed Perception of the Order of Things From a Global Perspective,
Piracy and the Jigsaw Puzzle Without a Piece
第50回国際研究集会，International Research Center for Japanese Studies 国際日本文化研究センター,
August 31, 2017, pp.9-18.

Introduction

Piracy and the Jigsaw Puzzle Without a Piece 1
Inaga Shigemi
Convener of the International Symposium
and Research Representative

In 2013, upon proposing a “piratical view of history,” we received a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific
Research (A).2 These proceedings of our international symposium, which was held during thefinal academic year (2015–2016) of this funded project, present part of our findings. We arealso compiling another set of collected papers in Japanese that will serve as the research findings
report for the joint research group “Adjusting the Orbit of Japan in the First Decade of theTwenty-First Century.”3 The following, a summary of the major points of discussion from ajoint research group meeting held on 21 June 2015, serves as an introduction to these projects.
1. Broadly speaking, our project has two major directions. This opinion was voiced by Mihara
Yoshiaki. On the one hand, there is the large-scale task of reconsidering the five hundred yearsof world history spanning from the so-called “Age of Exploration” to the present. In recent years
there has been a flood of books published with titles like A World History of X—almost thirty
can be easily pointed out. Therein we find Kaizoku no sekaishi 海賊の世界史 4. In fact, bookswith “pirate” in the title are similarly increasing rapidly. I have also published multiple articles
relating to piracy and world history.5 With regard to this, I, as the representative of the project,
had an opportunity to have discussions with individuals such as Kawakatsu Heita, the governorof Shizuoka prefecture. Incidentally, our “piratical view of history” (kaizoku shikan 海賊史観 ) isa parody of Kawakatsu’s “maritime view of history” (kaiyō shikan 海洋史観 ) that seeks to, under
the surface and with Kawakatsu’s permission, complement it. I’ve also been exchanging views
with such specialists in the field as Hamashita Takeshi and Irie Akira.

1

The text was originally written on 22 July 2015 as a guide for members of the research group led by
Inaga Shigemi at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. (Original subtitle: “Towards
the Publication of the Pirate Research Grant-in-Aid Project Article Collection”). The publication projects
mentioned are part of our joint project supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research.
2
独立行政法人日本学術振興会科学研究費助成事業（科学研究費補助金）基盤研究（A）（一般）平成 25
年度～平成 27 年度「海賊史観から交易を検討する：国際法と密貿易―海賊商品流通の学際的・文化史的研究」課題番号：25244011: The Pirates’ View of Trade: International Law versus Illegal Trade―An
Interdisciplinary Study of the Civilizations in Terms of the Piracy of Commodity Goods.
3
Official Japanese Title: “21 seiki 10 nendai Nihon no kidō shūsei” 21 世紀 10 年代日本の軌道修正 ; Official
English Title: “How to Readjust the Orbit? Checking the 20th Century Japanese Culture and Proposing a
New Vision for the 10th of the 21st Century.”
4
Including the classic Kaizoku no sekaishi 海賊の世界史 (A World History of Piracy) (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 2011); translation of The History of Piracy by Phillip Gosse.
5
http://www.nichibun.ac.jp/~aurora/pdf /1401aporia.pdf .
9Inaga Shigemi

2. On the other hand, there is the reconsideration of the scope of (the act of ) piracy as a
metaphor. In the first place, in European and American languages, why is the word “pirate”
used in this metaphorical sense, instead of, say, “bandit,” which refers to “pirates” who operateon land? This must reflect the history of Europe, which became the ruler of the world throughmaritime conquest. Relatedly, from the problem of pirated merchandise and electronic
communications arises a set of issues that includes the activities of the “Pirate Party” (studied
by Eguchi Kumi), which asserts citizenship in a virtual environment, as well as the relationshipbetween piracy and the fraying of intellectual property rights / copyright. There is a need toreconsider piracy and illegal acts in the history of commerce at the intersection between this andthe aforementioned modern world history. This is closely connected to the re-formation of thepresent world order. Several individuals affiliated with the current project raised such issues atthe exhibition-symposium “Utsuwa et utsushi,” (held at Maison de la Culture du Japon à Parisin January 2015).6 At the symposium, I advocated a “geological imagination,” an ecologicalreplacement for Sakai Naoki’s “geographical imagination” which tends to be politically charged
and manipulated by the hegemonic power (I will come back to the issue later).7
3. At the June joint research group meeting, strangely enough multiple presenters used themetaphor of a jigsaw puzzle (Kurata Takashi, Inaga Shigemi). Say that there is a jigsaw puzzle
missing a piece. The shape of this missing piece can be determined based on the shape ofthe eight pieces that surround it. Fukuoka Shin’ichi argues that a jigsaw puzzle is an effective
metaphor for explaining ecological equilibrium:8 an individual is not self-determining;rather, it appears as a function of its surrounding natural environment to fill in empty space.
Furthermore, during the development of the immune system in children, antigens / antibodies’
reactions treat the self as a “lack” or an “absence.” This is because that which “exists” from theperspective of the immune system is defined as something to be attacked and removed. “For the
immune system, the self is that which has been removed from the present you.” Such is the basic
perspective of Tada Tomio’s book Men’eki no imiron 免疫の意味論 (Semiotics of Immunity). If
this is the case, from the perspective of the immune system the self is a negative of that which
exists, a piece missing from a jigsaw puzzle.
6

Exposition: Réceptacle du passage ou La Vie transitoire des formes et ses empreintes, Colloque international:
Berceau du temps, Passage des âmes, Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris, France, 20–24 janvier, 2015,
http://www.nichibun.ac.jp/~aurora/.
7
Inaga Shigemi, “Chirigaku teki sōzōryoku kara chigaku teki sōzōryoku e: Sakai Naoki shi no kōen ‘Hon’
yaku to chizu sakuseijutsu teki sōzōryoku’ o kiite” 地理学的想像力から地学的想像力へ：酒井直樹氏の講演「翻訳と地図作成術的想像力」を聴いて (From Geographical Imagination to Geological Imagination:
Upon Hearing Sakai Naoki’s Lecture “Translation and Map-Creating Imagination”), Tosho shinbun 図書新
聞 2879 (26 July 2008),
http://toshoshimbun.jp/books_newspaper/week_description.php?shinbunno=2879&syosekino=851.
8
Fukuoka Shin’ichi, “Nakushita pīsu no seikyūhō ni kanshin” 無くしたピースの請求法に感心 (Impressedby the Way to Request a Lost Piece), Geijutsu to kagaku no aida 芸術と科学のあいだ (Between Art andScience), Nihon keizai shinbun 日本経済新聞, 14 December 2014, Sunday Edition; “Men’ekikei de wa
jiko wa kūkyo na ketsuraku” 免疫系では自己は空虚な欠落 (In the Immune System the Self is a Lack), 21
December 2014.
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Piracy and the Jigsaw Puzzle Without a Piece

Fukusawa Naoto, the director of The Japan Folk Crafts Museum, also has expressed theview that design is the act of appropriately filling in this final piece. Put in other terms, social
design is the functioning of the immune system. However, Fukusawa also raises the issue ofwhat happens when the jigsaw puzzle is warped.9 If warping is fostered and accepted as aprovided fact, then one might take part in the “crime” of affirming the world’s contradictions.
4. In fact, here we can also probe into the reason for proposing a piratical view of history. Let’stry and reverse this metaphor. Depending on one’s view, a piece missing from a jigsaw puzzle
could be seen as an opening that appeared when a piece could no longer fit due to the puzzle
becoming warped as a whole. In this vacant space the unreasonableness of the system overall
comes together, and contradictions are expressed as a lack. Similar to weeds quickly finding gaps
from which to grow, in this opening “illegal acts” that are incompatible with the puzzle’s overall
order and rules run rampant, forming a “lawless zone.”10 Is not a piratical view of history trying
to locate the anti-order small-scale rebellions that exist in such vacuums? While this opening
is a state of rebellion, it is also actually a safety apparatus that acts to avoid systemic crises thathave arisen due to lacks, restore overall equilibrium so as to avoid emergencies, and correct
flaws fatal to the system overall. Such piracy also at the same time shows that in this opening
the contradictions of the overall system are coming together and appearing. Is this not like thearchitect’s Tsukamoto Yoshiharu’s views on “niches” in architecture? 11
In marketing, such piracy itself is already being worked into commercial strategies andtactics. Companies, in response to piratical business methods that undermine their interests,
intentionally preserve and leave alone some pirate products instead of eliminating and removing
all of them. This is done because the existence of piracy can be useful for ensuring the qualityof genuine products. As Kataoka Mai has pointed out, situations are even arising that mix fact
and fiction. Businesses secretly put into the market “fake” pirate merchandise (fabricated bythemselves) and then act as if they were responding by imposing penalties on such merchandisein order to keep in check the distribution of “real” pirate merchandise.
5. Here, geological imagination becomes an issue. For products that circulate in a certain area
to become part of the world market, they must undergo a geological metamorphosis. Folds andfaults appearing in cross-sections of geological strata are traces of physical powers that acted
upon the earth crust, which also led to chemical metamorphosis. Underground magma becomes
exposed only after going through such a process. If we were to use a psychoanalytical metaphor,we could say that it is similar to the process in which psychological force dynamics experience
Fukusawa Naoto 深 澤 直 人 , “Shin kanchō to katariau kai” 新館長と語り合う会 (Speaking with the New
Museum President), at Nihon Mingeikan 日本民藝館 (Japan Folk Crafts Museum), 19 January 2013 (From
Kurata’s presentation).
10
Dennitza Gabrakova, Zassō no yume: Kindai nihon ni okeru “kokyō” to “kibō” 雑草の夢：近代日本における「故郷」と「希望」(Dreams of Weeds: “Hometown” and “Hope” in Modern Japan) (Yokohama: Seori
Shobō, 2012).
11“Niche | Tsukamoto Yoshiharu,” 10+1 30, Sprcial issue: Toshi purojekuto sutadi 都市プロジェクト・スタ
ディ (City Project Study): 13–18.
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Inaga Shigemi

censorship and correction and are sublimated.
Our jigsaw puzzle is a two-dimensional model. While it is effective as a metaphor forsurface layer power relations, in actually the earth’s crust is riding on top of the earth’s flowsthat support it from below (according to plate tectonics). This movement that is hidden below
the surface shapes surface expression. In economics terms, this is the track through which raw
materials are processed and become a product. Whether UNESCO World Heritage Sites orintangible cultural heritage, when being “listed as a stock,” that is, registered as heritage, changes
are sought in the original forms that have been preserved in a community so that they meetthe necessary requirements. Those which cannot withstand such demands are crossed off thelist right away. Put conversely, when a new product appears in a spot in the traditional market,
it sometimes is received as epoch-making merchandise, and, in contrast, at other times pushed
away as a pirate product and/or something that damages the market.
This can also be applied to the work of censorship and editing that takes place whentranslating local languages to major or world languages (observation by Nimura Junko).12
Censorship in the process of editing and translation could be described as a kind of antigen/antibody response. Quarantine deters the spread of endemic diseases before they aretransmitted. Similarly, cultural phenomena and products acquire the right to circulate on the
global market only after they have been controlled and detoxified, transforming into somethingsafe via a similar kind of cultural quarantine. The unofficial merchandise that is described as“pirate” attacks the blind spots in the quarantine system and skillfully takes advantage of its
deficiencies.13
6. The above provides us with a new perspective on the “Galápagos syndrome” that received
attention around the year 2000. While it was an expression used to ridicule the developmentof products specific to regions that do not meet international standards, it was also a term that
12

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in his Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (London & New
York: Routledge, 2016), paraphrases the issue as follows by referring to Richard Jacquemond, and summarizes“four hypotheses on “the problems of translating across power differentials”: “a dominant culture willinvariably translate far more of the hegemonic culture than the latter will of the former; when the hegemonic
culture does translate works produced by dominated culture, those works will be perceived and presented
as difficult, mysterious, inscrutable, esoteric, and in need of a small cadre of intellectuals to interpret them,while a dominated culture will translate a hegemonic culture’s works by trying to make them accessible to themasses; a hegemonic culture will only translate works by authors in a dominated culture that fit the former’s
preconceived notions of the latter; authors in a dominated culture who dream of reaching a larger audience
will tend to write while having in mind their translation into a hegemonic language, and this will require
some degree of compliance with stereotypes.” (p. 230). I have also made similar observation elsewhere, see“Philosophy, Ethics and Aesthetics in the Far-Eastern Cultural Sphere: Receptions of the Western Ideas andReactions to the Western Cultural Hegemony,” in The 38th International Research Symposium: Questioning
Oriental Aesthetics and Thinking: Conflicting Visions of “Asia” under the Colonial Empires (東洋美学と東洋的思惟を問う：植民地帝国下の葛藤するアジア像) , ed. Shigemi Inaga (Kyoto: International Research Center
for Japanese Studies, 2011), 31–45.
13
Inaga Shigemi, “Hon’yaku no seijigaku to zenkyūka e no teikō” 翻訳の政治学と全球化への抵抗 (The
Politics of Translation and Resistance to Globalization), in Kaiga no rinkai 絵画の臨界 (Images on the Edge)(Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2013, 1–20).
12

Piracy and the Jigsaw Puzzle Without a Piece

defended the characteristics of area cultures that lacked commensurability with world standards.
It is not an issue of which is good or which is bad. When products are being distributed fromregions to the world as a whole, along the way there are impediments, and on the upward
aspiration that seeks to pass through them is put the belt of world standards. If one resents
these restrictions, there is the option of Galápagosization. This phenomenon can be applied
to translation in general as well. While translation is the work of transforming a productfrom one to another clearly different language through linguistic mediation, it is carried out
based on the (paradoxical) premise that the product is no different in nature before and after
translation. If one thinks somewhat calmly about this quality guarantee, it is clear that it is alogical contradiction and deceptive. The border-transgressing act of translation is by definitiona piratical business method. In some cases this is approved of after the fact (The Nobel Prize in
Literature from the “third world”), and, conversely, in other cases sternly rejected. In the caseof the likes of concluding treaties, the piratical business method of mediation via translation
is given the approval of legality, and especially when interests are harmonized using lawfultranslation-based “straddling,” the treaty can be ratified.14
7. The metaphor of a bridge between cultures is often used. However, as Jacques Derrida
incisively argues, this expression is deceptive as an analogie. A bridge connects two shores thatare set apart by a deep crevice. Since the worlds of the two shores are markedly different, thebridge that connects them is, in fact, “a scar” that separates them. It is nothing other than asymbol that depicts the space between them as a gulf; this mediating bridge shows that between
the shores there is a “semantic depth”: something like “an analogy” —i.e. similarity—between
the two shores cannot come into existence.15 Yonaha Jun’s doctoral dissertation analyzes theprocess of diplomacy in Okinawa’s Ryukyu Kingdom, examining the politics of translation
therein.16 In its diplomatic negotiations that were sandwiched between massive and opposing
governments (i.e., Qing dynasties and the Satsuma Domain), having two sides (being doubletongued or engaging in double dealing) was indispensable. Put in Derridean terms, thisambiguity is pharmacon: medicine that also acts as poison. While the text of treaties are agreed
upon by two parties after reaching a mutual understanding, when information regarding
negotiations is released after a set period of time has passed (due to extinctive prescription), one
often finds that they had very different views of the text upon which they agreed. However, thereal joy of diplomatic negotiations lies in skillfully building bridges—especially in a situation inwhich compromise is impossible—via the full use of polysemic translation. In other words, thetruth of diplomacy lies in the two-sided margin or interval of the legalization of mistranslations
and the illegalization of accurate translations.
Inaga Shigemi, “Hibogo to iu gijie ni wa nani ga kakaru ka” 非母語という疑似餌には何が掛かるか (Whatis Caught on the Lure of a Non-Native Language?), in Bairingaruna Nihongo bungaku: Tagengo bungaku no
aida バイリンガルな日本語文学：多言語文学あいだ (Between Bilingual Japanese Literature and MultiLanguage Literature), ed. Guo Nanyan 郭南燕 (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2013), 22–46.
15
Jacques Derrida, La Vérité dans la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 43.
16
Yonaha Jun 与那覇潤, Hon’yaku no seijigaku 翻訳の政治学 (The Politics of Translation) (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 2009).
14

13

Inaga Shigemi

8. There is no way that a pirate ship would fly high its flag of statelessness and illegality. In somecases it approaches another boat after deceptively hoisting the flag of a friend, and then suddenly
raises its pirate flag to begin plunder, and at other times might pretend to be a powerful enemy
to avoid confrontation. In such flexibility lies the truth of pirates. A pirate is a pirate due totheir ability to assume the role of another, in other words, their lack of a fixed identity. It is
the destiny of pirate ships to freely transform themselves and navigate while appearing out of
nowhere and vanishing into thin air, as if poison and medicine are two sides of a Mobius strip.
9. Having reached this point, we can see how the “poison” of piracy is in the ambiguous positionof possibly being an antidote: it may expose the vast evil latent in what is commonly held tobe justice, or “a blessing” that performs such a revealing function. This is a phenomenon thatappears at the critical point where order and anti-order swap places, that is, the slender center
part of an hourglass or the point at which an inverted pyramid rests upon the tip of another.
What from one perspective appears to be reduction, a decreasing movement, from anotherperspective is expansion and amplification. From one angle it is disadvantageous, and fromanother advantageous. At this point of mixture appears the phenomenon of piracy. Here, rightand wrong are easily reversed. This closely resembles being fork-tongued or a double agent: it isan ambiguous modality.
10. It probably goes without saying that whether piracy is recognized as good or condemned asevil depends on the power structures that surround it. Corsairs were actually warships approvedby the Queen of England. “Pirates” was a derogatory term for condemning groups whose
livelihood consisted of the same actions carried out without government approval. Minor thefts
were considered crimes while major ones were state affairs publicly approved by royalty andthe aristocracy. Legality and illegality just depends on the (non-)existence of the backing ofauthority and legitimacy (Dennitza Gabrakova). Crisis management tends to want to clearly
distinguish between black and white. However, this differentiating posture is nothing more thana manufestation of established authority, it is an exercise of power that ensures its own safety
by condemning enemies as heretical and criminal. Political power cannot maintain its own“righteousness” without producing evil for condemnation.
11. In this way, we are again confronted with the question of the nature of a piece missing froma jigsaw puzzle. A hole formed on a puzzle surface is despised by authority as a den of anarchism(“ana-aki-shugi” 穴空き主義 , if I may), and crushing this underground headquarters or niche
becomes the venerable work of the police authorities that serve to maintain order. The immune
system of the state annihilates as enemies foreign elements because by definition such is its
function. If these holes are still a minority that is scattered about it is no problem. However, if
they gradually increase and become connected to each other, somewhere a critical point will bereached. Insofar as the order is the order, it must be the majority. If holes become the majority,
we can longer expect that the order will continue to exist. A “revolution” would thus refer to thestage at which the anti-order of a jigsaw puzzle hole becomes more dominant than the order andthe unity of the puzzle can no longer be maintained. If more and more holes continue to appear
14

Piracy and the Jigsaw Puzzle Without a Pieceand the puzzle’s design becomes imperceptible, the ecosystem’s dynamic balance (called “dynamic
equilibrium” in biology)—ensuring metabolism by filling in vacancies—is also undermined.
However, in a revolutionary situation in which this criticality has been surpassed, holes can nolonger be called piracy. In other words, piracy is a parasite that lives at the split seams of order.
If it comes to threaten the life of the host, it has changed in nature into something that goesbeyond piracy.
12. Here, I want to consider the apparent design (order) and the normally invisible area thatexists in its background (hidden-anti order). As a metaphor, let us think about puppeteers
in ningyō-jōruri 人形浄瑠璃. While the dolls performing in pieces on the stage appear to beautonomous, in reality they are being manipulated by puppeteers, who, in the context ofJapanese puppet theater, are called kuroko (literally, manipulators who hide their faces under
black cloth). While we are apt to assume that we are subjects that autonomously move basedon our own volition, Uchida Tatsuru argues while referring to Noh dance that this is just an
illusion. Just like a jigsaw puzzle missing a piece, actors sense the right location and timingof dance, as if filling out the hole in front of him or her. So long as they act so that no holes
are left, then and only then the show turns out to be successful. This is neither a passive
accommodation with the whole nor jumping to action based on one’s whims. Mutual reliance—
indispensable for a performance to work—is not necessarily the dissolving of parts by painting
over the whole.17
Furthermore, there is a troublesome issue: in Japanese puppet theater today the primarymanipulator (called the omozukai 主遣い) is left exposed to the audience. French intellectuals
who loved theater didn’t hide their puzzlement regarding this. Roland Barthes, perhaps in reaction against the pioneer Paul Claudel, put forth the complicated argument that the face of theomozukai exists to show the abolition of meaning, and that no meaning should be read into
them. He famously did so in his work Empire of Signs.18 Actually, it is said in the past the omozukai also covered their face with a black cloth, though it is also known that from the eighteenth
century, the bare-faced main manipulators were idolized by female spectators.
The possibility cannot be eliminated that the method of showing manipulator’s face duringperformances was intensified and institutionalized amidst Westernization / modernization. If
this is the case, that would mean that Barthes found “Japan’s sign” in something that became anestablished rule under the influence of the West, and that he was forced to provide an excessiveinterpretation or rationalization of it. This is the Chikamatsu Monzaemon theory of the interspace of skin membranes between unreal and real beings (kyojitsu himaku ron 虚実皮膜論 ) in
cultural translation. If so, can we not find in the gap between the kuroko and the face-revealingomozukai, in this revealing and hiding or coming and going, a pirate-like being, that is, a clue
for reconsidering the ambiguity of legitimacy?
Uchida Tatsuru 内田樹, “Dentō bunka ni yadoru mono” 伝統文化に宿るもの (That which Dwells in
Traditional Culture), A Conversation with Kobayashi Masahiro 小林昌廣, in Tsugu koto, tsutaeru koto 継ぐ
こと・伝えること (Inheriting and Transmitting) (Kyoto: Kyoto Geijutsu Center, 2014), 88–90.
18
Roland Barthes, L’Empire des signes (Geneva: Skira, 1970), 81.
17

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Inaga Shigemi

13. Let us consider English as an academic language. Many people whose native language
is not English write academic articles in it. This involves the translation of a regional nonEnglish language, and, on the surface, writing of English terms in accordance with its grammar
and vocabulary. However in reality, under this surface are stuck like sediment the words andideas from the non-English starting language. Connotations different than those that arise
in understanding English terms are found preserved in the native language interpretations.
Using the example of colonial India, Homi Bhabha has called colonized upper classes imitatingcolonizers’ culture “mimicry,” using a term that originally referred to plants or insects imitatingother species to survive.19
The use of English is a good example of learning based on this mimicry. Slogans like“democracy” have various meanings based on the person doing interpreting them, and at times
even incompatible ones are entangled together (Chiba Kei). However, the effectiveness ofpolitical discourse lies in ignoring such below the surface differences and, calling for democracy
to be thoroughly carried out, acquiring the electorate’s solidarity. English as a world language
also is equipped with a similar function. Therein a somewhat ironic situation emerges. The word
“democracy” is probably an excellent example. Under this same term what are actually different
realities are seen as the same, and the various and contradictory wishes of the electorate areintegrated together. However, the content of this word hypertrophies, giving rise to inflation,
which makes it have a diminished value. On the other hand, foreign words are incorporated
into English. Words from Japanese such as tsunami, sushi, bento, and kawaii are found in English
dictionaries. However, we can see by the example of the California roll that their nature changes
when they enter the English language. When it gets to this point of hybridity, the real thing andmimicry are almost indistinguishable. In short, a single term becoming part of the common
world currency is itself a piratical mimicry; it is estranged and inconsistent from its significationin its original language. There is surely much to be learned from how Homi Bhabha, theadvocate of this mimicry theory, has now become the object of mimicry as a behavior model for
the Anglophone academic world.
14. The likes of a discursive analysis of orthodoxy and mimicry is no longer an issue. This was
Gayatri Spivak’s concise assessment of my analysis of cultural translation based on a piraticalview of history.20 The kuroko removes their hood and exposes their face. Did this have thesame meaning as third-world intellectuals who had been anonymous making a living with
their real name by shedding their skin to become a star in Western society? However, are those
who exposed their faces mimicking colonizers, or have they usurped the colonizer’s culture?
Alternatively, does it epitomise the cultural situation of the so-called post-colonial present—
or at the very least that of the imperial capital cities of the past: the puppet of theater (that is19

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), 82. “To be Anglicized is emphatically not
to be English,” he remarks (87).
20
Shigemi Inaga, “A ‘Pirates’ View’ of Art History,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 26 (December 2014[sic]): 65–79. Paper originally presented in the following symposium: “What Words Can Tell Us ThroughTranslation: The Future of the Humanities” (The 2012 Kyoto Prize Workshop in Arts and Philosophy),
http://www.nichibun.ac.jp/~aurora/pdf/121112kyoto_prize.pdf.
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Piracy and the Jigsaw Puzzle Without a Piece

supposedly being performed in a Western style) is transformed (via kuroko from foreign cultural
spheres) into something of an alien and alienated nature (before people realize it)?
15. With a quarter century having past since the 1989 collapse of the Cold War, the postWorld War II worldwide “Yalta Order” is now becoming a thing of the past. The legitimacy
of world standards is on the verge of being lost. While it is probably mistaken to translate
hegemony as haken 覇権, the competition over linguistic hegemony between English andChinese—such as “empire” being compared to tianxia 天下—straightforwardly shows how
deceptive “globalization” is.21 Along with the loss of the world’s sheriff, a replacement hegemonyor supremacy has not been established. This world of ours is overflowing with mimicries ofrighteousness, and could be ridiculed as a situation in which piracy is temporarily runningrampant. The field of finance, which is almost completely unrelated to the real economy, rules
the world, and the spread of the internet has, at the very least in the exchange of information in
virtual spaces, practically speaking defeated the tariff barriers in traditional financial transactions
and product distribution as well as the quarantine apparatuses of cultural national borders.
16. Facing this multi-sided advancement of this worldwide piratical situation—which could also
be described in psychiatric terms as a tsutsunuke jōtai 筒抜け状態 or “a state of uncontrollable
leakage” (Nagai Mari)22 —what kind of measures can be groped for? As is already clear, ajigsaw puzzle which began to show signs of collapse can no longer be repaired with the ossified
allopathic or symptomatic treatment alone: A unilateral crack-down on piracy as somethingillegal, and just punishing perpetrators would not suffice. Traditional geographical imagination(Naoki Sakai) or a sense of governing based on the unit of the nation-state is no longer tenable.
Rather, at present we need to focus on the visually recognizable “missing piece,” and steadily
inspect the kinds of conflict gathering at such missing points that can become hotbeds of piracy.
Complicated entanglement of the overall dynamics of distortion can be found in such nodesof contradiction. We can identify them via an autopsy, so to speak. Such a task is not one forwhich we can easily offer a miracle-drug prescription. Rather, is not such a worldview—that
hastily seeks solutions like all-powerful wonder drugs and hopes for the safe restoration of theHigh Seas ruled by Order—, the very cause of the current hole-filled situation we find ourselvesin?
A world map that is like a jigsaw puzzle filled with holes and the missing pieces that21

Regarding the difference between “hegemony” (a basically affirmative centripetal power structure) andthe Chinese / Japanese term baquan / haken 覇権 (wicked exercise of force that stands in contrast to royalauthority wangquan / ōken 王権) that is frequently used as its translation, see Shiraishi Takashi 白石隆, Umi
no teikoku: Ajia o dō kangaeru ka 海の帝国：アジアをどう考えるか (Ocean Empire: How Should we Think
About Asia?) (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha, 2000); and Zhao Tingyang 赵汀阳, “Rethinking Empire from a
Chinese Concept ‘All-under-Heaven’ (Tian-xia, 天下),” Social Identities 12, no. 1 (January 2006): 29–41. See
also Shiraishi Takashi, Kaiyō Ajia vs. tairiku Ajia 海洋アジア vs. 大陸アジア (Oceanic Asia vs. Continental
Asia) (Kyoto: Minerva Shobō, 2016), ch. 2.
22
Nagai Mari 長井真理, Naisei no kōzō 内省の構造 (The Structure of Self-Reflexiveness) (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1991).
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Inaga Shigemi

expose holes: the likes of piracy in Somalia, or the Islamic State world-wide terrorism are typicalexamples of such holes, missing pieces, that opened wide in today’s world. Research that while
risking the danger of falling into this subsidential hole draws close to the dynamics within it is
the indispensable starting point for a piratical view of history. While speaking of a hole arisingfrom a missing piece might give readers a static impression, if we actually go into such holes, wemight actually find a swirl of meeting currents, like the great maelström depicted by Edgar Allen
Poe. Has the time not come for us to change the habitual course of following the establishedorder, and decide on a new course for the pirate ship for a pursuit into the whirlpool, theraging abysse or the mise-en-abyme, an eternally recessive nested coats of arms which leads us inprofundus?

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