"If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise no real country by my fantasy (though it is then that fantasy itself I compromise by the signs of literature). I can also--though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse)--isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of these features (a term employed in linguistics). and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan."

~Empire of Signs

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