A survey of rhetoric course begins in ancient Greece, moves to the Romans, heads westward over time through Europe and the New World. Our course attempts to include rhetoric from China, India and Persia, but still overlooks rhetorical contributions from Japan, Africa, and the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas. My focus will be on why these other traditions are overlooked, with an emphasis on Japan. While it is noble to add to the study of non-Western rhetorics, Japan is a glaring omission. Our course covers the Near East, the Far East and the Indian subcontinent, but stops as soon as it hits the waters of the Sea of Japan 

Japan has borrowed heavily from other cultures but manages to maintain a unique identity. Buddhism was borrowed from India and is practiced alongside Shinto. The writing system was borrowed from China, but Japan also developed two syllabaries based on the Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Japanese. One of the writing systems, katakana, is used primarily to represent words borrowed from other languages. If Japan borrowed from the Chinese or Indian rhetorical traditions, then Japanese rhetoric may have been considered not unique enough to be worthy of study by western scholars. The Indian rhetoric we read was written by Buddha, so his other writings have influenced Japan; this should extend into the realm of rhetoric. 

One obstacle I face in studying Japanese rhetoric is that I have not yet found any instances of Japanese rhetoric. I do not believe that Japanese rhetoric does not exist, I just have not found where it is. Another obstacle is that my knowledge of Japanese is insufficient to read classical texts. I will need to rely on translators to understand Japanese rhetoric. If the text is not already translated then I will not be able to use it in my study. 

Some of the books I checked out were not as helpful as I had hoped. George A. Kennedy’s Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction considers the rhetoric of the Ancient Near East, Ancient China, Ancient India, Greece, Rome, Australian Aborigines, North American Indians and even nonhuman animals, but nothing on Japan. Robert T. Oliver’s Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China mentions that the rhetoric of Korea, Japan, Tibet, Ceylon, Muslim India and Buddhist China have not yet been explored, so Oliver says there is a Japanese rhetoric tradition. Hopefully someone has translated some Japanese rhetoric since 1971 when Oliver wrote his book. Rhetoric before and beyond the Greeks, edited by Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley studies different rhetorics including the Egyptian and Biblical traditions, but also excludes Japanese. 

It would be inconceivable to think that there is no Japanese rhetorical tradition; it clearly has been overlooked by western academia to this point. I will have to study some translated Japanese philosophical texts to tease out the rhetoric of Japan.