The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

Editor’s Introduction

As the terrorists’ attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon headquarter buildings on September 11, 2001 let loose torrents ofnewspapers and magazine editorials, papers and articles, and evenbooks, it may not be inappropriate here to make an effort to seek someconnections between the incident and this issue’s major theme “space:real and imagined.”
First of all, a sense of space differs by country, as it reﬂects a particular tradition or history. When I ﬁrst placed myself inside an American
community many years ago, I found that each home address there wasdetermined as a location function of a nearby street. It can be said that
“Where there is no road, there is no address.” If this does not soundstrange, you may not be familiar with the Japanese situation. In Japan,
your home address is a portion of a designated area which originally
was divided by overlords. You may have a home address even if there
is no direct road access. In a sense, the address is a given for each resident in Japan. You can easily ﬁnd a home site which has no way out toa nearby street in Japan. In such a case, the owner must buy some portion of a neighbor’s land in order to reach the outside without bothering other people. This is called Shido, or a private lane.
American history developed as frontiersmen cleared forests, uprooted trees and made roads deep into the land previously occupied by
Native Americans. For their part, Native Americans were not muchconcerned with making roads, because they did not ﬁnd it difﬁcult towalk or run through the uncultivated hills and mountains. When theroads or railways made by Europeans penetrated into their living
space, their ability to hunt, cultivate, and live was seriously weakened.
And then the familiar history of westward movement and exploitation
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AKIMOTOof natural resources by Americans would follow thereafter. There may
be as many deﬁnitions of space as number of nations, in addition tothese examples.
We are now experiencing the interconnections of various spaces in
the modern world. Among other things, urbanization ﬁrst created hugemetropolitan cities characterized with a strong local ﬂavor. Then several cities became either national (like Washington, D.C. or Edo, forerunner of Tokyo) or cosmopolitan (like New York, Paris, or London)in their orientation. Not everything about cities is desirable, as theeconomy of urbanization tells us. People gather around a city because
if you are a trader, there are many who would buy your goods, and if
you are a laborer, there are many jobs waiting for you. Since there
develops a merit of accumulation in urban areas, many different consumers or entrepreneurs who did not feel a ﬁrsthand necessity to comein to the cities would gather there, too. Then from some point on, accumulation causes various demerits: bad sanitary conditions throughcongestion, air pollution, noise, trafﬁc congestion and accidents, frequent crimes, etc. In progressive era America, cities like Milwaukee,
Wisconsin had “sewage socialism” as citizens there demanded that thecity administration improve their everyday life at various levels ofpublic service.
Cosmopolitan (now known as global) cities like New York haveattracted people all the more since the beginning of the informationage in the late twentieth century. Contrary to many people’s expectations, the internet or computerization cannot satisfy all the needs forinformation. People need to talk in person and sometimes they must
read each others faces in order to plan investment or collaboration.
After September 11, it is almost hindsight to say that over-crowdedness conﬂicted with the limited space availability of Manhattan Island,
and that the twin World Trade Center buildings had been among partial answers. Some would say the terrorists criticized the globalization
initiated by American ﬁnancial capital because it worsened the economic cleavage between North and South nations, but the argument
misses the point that New York or the World Trade Center is global
rather than American in character. The image of America is consistent
with ﬂat, wide buildings or living space scattered around local communities. Historically the end of the frontier planted the notion ofclosed space in the heart of American people, with the 1930s depression symbolizing pessimism for the future. After World War II

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

3American people mostly conﬁned themselves within their own boundaries, enjoying the American dream. Gradually globalization progressed, ﬁrst as an Atlantic economy (United States with Europe underMarshall Plan), then as a global capital market, and ﬁnally widening toengulf the Soviet Union and the east European nations with the end ofCold War. The image of New York as multi-ethnic city may be mostclosely ﬁtted with the post Cold War era. As the reconstruction of thecity proceeds, we must be careful not to make the city space exclusionary, as has often been seen in the reconstructed area of past civil
wars around the globe.
In this issue, eight articles are dedicated to the main theme of space,from various perspectives. Masashi Orishima in his “Immersed in
Palpable Darkness: Republican Virtue and the Spatial Topography ofCharles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn,” takes up Brown’s novel
Arthur Mervyn, and points out that Mervyn lacks a certain requisite fortaking part in the Republican national community, because Brown’scharacters seem to have difﬁculty in seeing and imagining an outsidespace. From Mervyn’s sense of space, it is difﬁcult to reach out towards an “imagined community,” a national space of commerce, politics, and virtue. Hiroshi Okayama in his “Analyzing ‘Political Space’
Two-Dimensionally: the Notion and Prospects of Interpolitical Relations,” develops a new, two-dimensional approach (“interpolitical relations”) in understanding segmented U.S. national politics. He advocates taking a horizontal, spatial approach in addition to considering
vertical relationships between governments.
In his “Spatial Organization of Japanese Immigrant Communities:
Spontaneous Settlements and Planned Colonies in the Northern San
Joaquin Valley, California,” Noritaka Yagasaki explores the way
Japanese immigrants organized their space in the American host society by examining the settlement processes in the northern San Joaquin
Valley, California. The two types of communities, spontaneous settlements and planned colonies, differed from each other in terms ofsettlement strategies, farming practices and land use, immigrants’organizations, and relations with surrounding white communities.
These differences were reﬂected in their forms of spatial organization.
In her “Producing Asian American Spaces: From Cultural Nation to
the Space of Hybridity as Represented in the Texts by Asian AmericanWriters,” Fukuko Kobayashi examines some representative texts by
Asian American writers, ﬁnding that the authors demonstrate an acute4AKIMOTO

desire to produce their own imaginary Asian American spaces thatpass through three different stages: a space of cultural nationalism, ofmothers and daughters, and of hybridity.
In her “Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility in theCinema of John Ford’s The Searchers,” Julia Leyda argues that director John Ford’s representations of American national identity during
the 1950s are intimately bound up in questions of space, mobility, anddomesticity. The Western movie The Searchers articulated the ideological complexities of the 1950s by constructing the family as a space
both endangered and resolutely protected. In his “Is the ‘Cyberspace
Revolution’ Really a Revolution? A Case Study: Healthcare and Modern Scientiﬁc Thought,” Yoneyuki Sugita redeﬁnes the cyberspace
revolution as an extension of modern scientiﬁc technology. He examines the role of information technology in the American healthcareﬁeld historically as well as theoretically and denies that the cyberspace
revolution is a qualitatively new system, as is widely argued.
Simon Potter criticizes academic geographers in America in his“Another Closing Frontier? Observations on Geography in AmericanAcademe.” He traces the recent controversy inside the Association ofAmerican Geographers and suggests in order to ameliorate the crisis
geographers need to emphasize “spatial analysis” as the key concept inclaiming a place for their discipline in the academy. In her “Across theMultiverse: How Do Aliens Travel from ‘Divisional’ Space to ‘Network’ Space?” Mari Kotani deﬁnes the “multiverse” as a multilayered
network space in contrast with past divisional space. Focusing upon
the rise of female science ﬁction and horror ﬁction in the 1990s, she
attaches importance to the chasing game aspect linking global hypermedia and postmodern representation.
Writing on general topics, Nahoko Tsuneyama traces the history ofthe acceptance of Shakespeare in the U. S. from colonial days throughthe end of the nineteenth century in her “Americanization of Shakespeare:
A Cultural History through Three Posters.” According to Tsuneyama,
the three posters clarify the postcolonial process of appropriation andnaturalization of Shakespeare into the American theatrical scene. She
suggests that the historical process might indicate that Shakespeare
was received not as an elitist ﬁgure, a familiar image for us today, but
as Americanized popular culture. Yuka Tsuchiya in her “Imagined
America in Occupied Japan: (Re-) Educational Films Shown by theU.S. Occupation Forces to the Japanese, 1948–1952,” deals with the

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5“re-education ﬁlms” shown in occupied Japan by the U.S. armedforces. According to Tsuchiya, the American government gave considerable importance to documentary ﬁlms as tools to convert theJapanese into American allies, building a consensus society along withanti-communist ideology. But she contends that the policy was only
partially successful.
We welcome active responses from our readers and hope they will
be encouraged to submit their work to future issues, so that the publication will continue to be an important medium for American Studies
across both disciplinary and national boundaries.
Eiichi Akimoto
Editor6AKIMOTO

For those who wish to submit a manuscript to the Japanese
Journal of American Studies:
1. Contributors must be dues-paying members of the JAAS.
2. Contributors are expected to observe our time schedule.
They must ﬁrst submit the title and abstract (about 300words) by mid-January. We are unable to accept the manuscript without this procedure.
3. The ﬁnal manuscript (maximum 7000 words includingnotes) is due early May. The editorial committee will inform each contributor of the result of the selection processby the end of June. If accepted, the paper will be publishedin June the following year.
4. The fall issue of the JAAS Newsletter will carry “call forpapers” announcement with exact deadlines and special
theme for the forthcoming issue.
5. The JAAS will accept inquiries through email:jaas@cd.inbox.ne.jp