Purple Magazine
— Purple #43 S/S 2025
The Tokyo Diary Issue

empire of signs

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 features (a term employed in linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan.

Hence Orient and Occident cannot be taken here as “realities” to be compared and contrasted historically, philosophically, culturally, politically. I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence — to me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation — whose invented interplay — allows me to “entertain” the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own. What can be addressed, in the consideration of the Orient, are not other symbols, another metaphysics, another wisdom (though the latter might appear thoroughly desirable); it is the possibility of a difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems. Someday we must write the history of our own obscurity — manifest the density of our narcissism, tally down through the centuries the several appeals to difference we may have occasionally heard, the ideological recuperations which have infallibly followed and which consist in always acclimating our incognizance of Asia by means of certain known languages (the Orient of Voltaire, of the Revue Asiatique, of Pierre Loti, or of Air France). Today there are doubtless a thousand things to learn about the Orient: an enormous labor of knowledge is and will be necessary (its delay can only be the result of an ideological occultation); but it is also necessary that, leaving aside vast regions of darkness (capitalist Japan, American acculturation, technological development), a slender thread of light search out not other symbols but the very fissure of the symbolic. This fissure cannot appear on the level of cultural products: what is presented here does not appertain (or so it is hoped) to art, to Japanese urbanism, to Japanese cooking. The author has never, in any sense, photographed Japan. Rather, he has done the opposite: Japan has starred him with any number of “flashes”; or, better still, Japan has afforded him a situation of writing. This situation is the very one in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void, without the object’s ever ceasing to be significant, desirable. Writing is after all, in its way, a satori: satori (the Zen occurrence) is a more or less powerful (though in no way formal) seism which causes knowledge, or the subject, to vacillate: it creates an emptiness of language. And it is also an emptiness of language which constitutes writing; it is from this emptiness that derive the features with which Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes gardens, gestures, houses, flower arrangements, faces, violence.

END

EXCERPT FROM EMPIRE OF SIGNS BY ROLAND BARTHES, HILL AND WANG, THE NOONDAY PRESS, 1989, NEW YORK, TRANSLATED BY RICHARD HOWARD. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FRENCH AS L’EMPIRE DES SIGNES, COPYRIGHT 1970, ÉDITIONS D’ART ALBERT SKIRA S.A., GENEVA.

[Table of contents]

editor’s letter
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empire of signs
by Roland Barthes
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cover #1 takashi murakami
interview by Jérôme Sans
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takashi murakami
interview by Jérôme Sans
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ryoko sekiguchi
interview by Mark Alizart and Olivier Zahm
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cover #2 motoko ishibashi
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motoko ishibashi
interview by Aleph Molinari
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atsuko tanaka
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sexual assault breaking the silence
by Karyn Nishimura-Poupée
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juergen teller and nobuyoshi araki
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chiho aoshima
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hajime sawatari
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suwa nagano
by Stéphane Sednaoui
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fetish magazines
by Katerina Jebb
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tadanoori yokoo
text by André Michel
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kazumi asamura hayashi
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keiichi tanaami
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fumihiro hayashi
text by Olivier Zahm
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nobuyoshi araki
portrait by Chikashi Suzuki
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tomoo gokita
interview by Olivier Zahm
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cover #4 tomoo gokita
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loewe s/s 2025
photography by Suffo Moncloa
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hajime sorayama
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my father
by Rick Owens
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announcement to humanity
by Ryoko Sekiguchi
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cover #3 katerina jebb
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cover #5 loewe s/s 2025
photography by Suffo Moncloa
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masahisa fukase
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hajime kinoko
interview by Olivier Zahm
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raiki yamamoto
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cover #6 masahisa fukase
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kunichi nomura
text by Aaron Rose
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aya takano
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tomoyo kawari
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masaru hatanaka
interview by Aleph Molinari
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why japan?
by Urs Fischer, Ramdane Touhami, Stéphane Sednaoui
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cover #8 esther rose-mcgregor in valentino s/s 2025
photography by Hart Lëshkina
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why japan?
by Helmut Lang
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minoru nomata
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in praise of shadows
by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
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photography by Takashi Homma
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purple beauty nails
by Mei Kawajiri
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ryūichi sakamoto
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valentino s/s 2025
photography by Hart Lëshkina
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nobuyoshi araki
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cover #10 bottega veneta
photography by Nikolai von Bismarck
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balenciaga s/s 2025
photography by Juergen Teller
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kazuo ohno
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cover #7 prada s/s 2025
photography by Takashi Homma
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butoh the dance of darkness
photography by Nikolai von Bismarck
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cover #9 balenciaga s/s 2025
photography by Juergen Teller
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tomihiro kono
photography by Joe Lai
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cover #12 comme des garçons s/s 2025
photography by Ola Rindal
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comme des garçons s/s 2025
photography by Ola Rindal
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cover #11 nobuyoshi araki
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chanel s/s 2025
photography by Chikashi Suzuki
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the japanese lessons we refuse to learn
by Daido Moriyama
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dualité by brioni and lalique
photography by Olivier Zahm
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pink eiga
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cover #18 sakura andō in chanel s/s 2025
photography by Chikashi Suzuki
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noritoshi hirakawa
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tomo koizumi
photography by Chikashi Suzuki
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trails
by Takashi Homma
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koji kimura
by André Michel
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cover #13 dualité by brioni and lalique
photography by Olivier Zahm
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daido moriyama
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erotica
by Olivier Zahm
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purple story
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takuro kuwata
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cover #16 saint laurent by anthony vaccarello s/s 2025
photography by Takashi Homma
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setsuko klossowska de rola
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cover #15 paul & joe
photography by Olivier Zahm
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why japan?
by Coco Capitán
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alejandro garcia contreras
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casablanca s/s 2025
photography by Keizo Motoda
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why japan?
by Stefano Pilati
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saint laurent by anthony vaccarello s/s 2025
photography by Takashi Homma
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why japan?
by André
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best of men s/s 2025
Photography by Kejichi Nitta
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kei ninomiya
interview by Olivier Zahm
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anders edström
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zen gardens
by Takashi Homma
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wabi-sabi spiritual values
by Leonard Koren
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wim wenders
interview by Olivier Zahm and Aleph Molinari
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miu miu s/s 2025
photography by Coco Capitán
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ruth asawa
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kazuyo sejima
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waves
by Takashi Homma
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jun takahashi
interview by Aleph Molinari
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cover #14 casablanca s/s 2025
photography by Keizo Motoda
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kumiko
by Anna Dubosc
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yōko yamanaka
interview by Olivier Zahm
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mariko mori
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cover #17 miu miu s/s 2025
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the tokyo toilet
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young designers s/s 2025
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self-portrait
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yoshitomo nara
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yasujirō ozu
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the isamu noguchi garden museum
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yoko and john in karuizawa
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