essay by ROLAND BARTHES French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes (1915–1980) visited Japan in 1966, where he wrote his famous essay Empire of Signs. The book shaped France’s intellectual and artistic fascination with Japan, serving as a key introduction to the country for decades. While sometimes critiqued as a form of Orientalism, it remains one of the most significant works written about Japan. 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…