Abstract
The paper aims to understand the process of constituting and consolidating Japanese Studies in the Czech lands, i.e. the Western parts of Czechoslovakia consisting of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, in the period between the liberation of the Czechoslovakia (1945) and the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies (1968). Professional literature based on eyewitness memoirs, when evaluating postwar Japanology in the Czech lands, logically emphasizes the ideological barriers in terms of methodology (the application of historic materialism across research topics) and the absence of more intense foreign links.
Through the study of archival and written resources, however, this view changes considerably and takes on a completely new perspective. It is apparent that in 1945-1968 the academic subfield of Japanology had substantially more favourable conditions to develop than in the "normalisation" period (1968-1989) and also in the republican and Protectorate periods in Czech history (1918-1938 and 1939-1945).
It was the ideological conformity and compatibility of the founding generation of Japanology, complemented with sophisticated negotiation strategies, that created suitable grounds for the autonomous development of the discipline after World War Two. What were the foundations from which this discipline emerged in the Czech lands after World War Two? To what extent was it influenced by the survival, adaptation and negotiation strategies of the members of the founding generation of this discipline? The analysis of the behaviour of the social agents (the micro-level) within the context of paradigmatic and ideological changes in the social structure (the macro-level) using the sociological methodology of Pierre Bourdieu enables to particularise the "sonderweg" of Japanese Studies in the Czech lands.