The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 31 (2020)

Editor’s Introduction

This issue of The Japanese Journal of American Studies carries“Community” as its special topic. In recent issues we tended to have few
submissions that were not related to the special topic of each issue, so weare happy to also present articles of various topics this time and hope thiswill continue in future issues.
The first seven articles have “Community” as their theme. Put together,
they demonstrate the multiple possibilities of American Studies in terms ofresearch methods and analytical approaches. Some of them also demonstrate
how studying specific communities may also lead to understanding
international and/or transnational realities and research approaches. Threearticles on various topics follow. Within each category, articles are arranged
in roughly chronological order by topic.
First, I will briefly introduce the seven articles dedicated to this issue’s topic.
Izumi Ogura in “The Concord Community: Ralph Waldo Emerson and theAntislavery Movement” explores Emerson’s journals and lectures, and illustrates
how Emerson, who has often been perceived as distant from social issues andpolitics, actively participated in forming and influencing antislavery sentimentin the Northern intellectual community. Yuko Matsumoto in “Community
Building in Harlem: The New York Age in the 1910s” examines the process ofAfrican American community building in Harlem in the 1910s, which led to theHarlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and reveals how the Harlem-based African
American publication, the New York Age, played an important part in theprocess. Michiyo Kitawaki and Bruce P. Bottorff both focus on the JapaneseAmerican community in Hawaii before the World War II; Kitawaki follows thehistory of Western-style dress-making practices and schools within thecommunity of Japanese immigrants and the Japanese Americans, and Bottorff
discusses how the YWCA, which intended to “Americanize” multiethnic
Hawaiian girls, turned out to be an influential site for gender and ethnic
awareness for young Hawaiian women. Yushi Yamazaki’s “Becoming1

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SUGIYAMAInternationalist Subjects: The Growth of Multiracial Labor Organizing among
Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1925–1933” also deals withJapanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, although its emphasis is on theimportance of the internationalist, multiracial, and multiethnic characteristics ofthe Japanese and Japanese American labor movement in the United States.
Ayako Sahara’s “Sharing the Travail of Reeducation Camps, Expelling theBetrayer: The Politics of Deportation in a Vietnamese American Community”
investigates the complicated process of community building among
Vietnamese in the United States by examining the deportation case of Bùi ĐìnhThi, a former “reeducation camp” guard in postwar Vietnam. Kumiko
Noguchi’s “Keeping the Indian Tribal Community Together: Nation-Buildingand Cultural Sovereignty in the Indian Casino Era” is based on her interviews
with Californian “gaming” tribes and includes her analysis of the function andimportance of the gaming industry for Native American communities.
We have a variety of topics in the last three articles. Satomi Minowa in“‘Free Love’ in Sectional Debates over Slavery in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
America” focuses on the term “free love” and closely analyzes how both
political sides on the issue of slavery made use of the term’s negative genderand race connotations. Koji Ito’s “Contesting Alaskan Salmon: Fishing Rights,
Scientific Knowledge, and a US-Japanese Fishery Dispute in Bristol Bay inthe 1930s” examines the US-Japan relationship in the 1930s by closely
following the dispute over salmon fishing and emphasizes the importance ofscientific knowledge and conservation in US policymaking on this matter. Mai
Isoyama bases “The Asia Foundation’s Cold War Influence on Tadao
Yanaihara’s Educational Research Institute in Japan” on her archival researchon the Japanese educational research group (the Institute of Student Affairs,Gakusei Mondai Kenkyusho) that was the Asia Foundation’s grantee, and theCIA’s influence on both, and analyzes how Cold War politics affected the Asia
Foundation, thus shedding light on one intellectual, but also political, aspect ofthe post-World War II US-Japan relationship.
As always, I would like to thank Katy Meigs for her continuing assistanceas copy editor for the journal and Yuriko Tsunoda for her support. The articles
published in The Japanese Journal of American Studies, including those fromback issues, are freely available online (http://www.jaas.gr.jp). We invite
responses and criticisms from our readers and hope that the journal willcontinue to be an important player in the field of American Studies.
NAOKO SUGIYAMAEditor