Abstract This essay builds on Walter Johnson’s “On Agency” to reflect on how the concept of the liberal subject as agent has been understood in Euro-American and Japanese intellectual discourses on Asia and especially Japan. It begins with a discussion of “the subject” in Orientalism and Liberalism and its entanglements with historicist and imperialist understandings of a progressive “West” and laggard “East,” as well as the travels of Orientalist discourse from Europe to Asia. It then considers how postcolonial interventions as well as Foucault’s critique of the liberal subject have stimulated a rethinking of the self-constituting agent of choice and ends with thoughts on how a multiply spirited notion of the subject may offer suggestions for conceptualizing an alternative agent of action and social responsibility who refuses the self-importance of a singular subject.