The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 17 (2006)

Editor’s Introduction

The year 2006 marks the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Japanese
Association of American Studies. The Japanese Journal of American Studies,
which was inaugurated in order to disseminate scholarly works produced inJapan to a wider audience, has been in print for twenty-ﬁve years. It is ﬁtting toremember at this juncture that the mission of the journal has changed somewhat
during those years. It was once considered important to present Japanese perspectives on America and American Studies, as well as to nurture scholars specializing in American Studies in Japan. The special theme of the ﬁrst issue was“United States Policy and East Asia: 1945–1950,” and similar themes focusing
on the relationship between Japan and the United States recur frequently during the early years of the journal.
Although these tendencies are not completely gone, the focus of the journal
has shifted quite distinctively in recent years. Partly as a reﬂection of an increasing trend observed around the world to place American Studies in a more international, or transnational context, more authors are starting to contextualize
their studies in various creative ways. They are producing more nuanced, multilayered and multifaceted studies of America, cutting across both national anddisciplinary border lines. As a result, it is becoming more and more difﬁcult todetermine what constitutes “Japanese” American Studies.
The diversity and richness of scholarship produced in Asia including Japanis the theme explored in the ﬁrst essay in this volume, entitled “Asian Crossroads/Transnational American Studies,” by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, former president of the American Studies Association. This paper is based on her address
before the annual meeting of the Japanese Association of American Studies in2005 and is a companion to her paper “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies,” published in American Quarterly in March
2005. By introducing the array of books and papers coming out of Asia and,also, by Asian-Americans based in the United States, she demonstrates how
these works can function as a guide in exploring the way in which scholars candislocate and relocate the study of American Studies.

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Ten essays in this issue are devoted to the special theme of the current issue,“gender.” In editing the volume, the question of how to conceptualize gender
and what stories and lessons we should draw from our effort to comprehend theconcept were left entirely to the authors. All essays, however, demonstrate eachin its own way that “gender” has become one of the most critical concepts withwhich to analyze American history, culture and society.
The ﬁrst three essays deal with the history of social movements that overtly
or covertly changed the terms within which the issues of gender were constructed in the United States and elsewhere. In “The 1910s Anti-Prostitution
Movement and the Transformation of American Political Culture,” Hiroyuki
Matsubara examines the shifting language of the anti-vice campaign in the earlytwentieth century. By tracing the changes observed in the anti-prostitution
movement in San Francisco and the ongoing competition among middle classreformers, he brings new insights into the transformation of American politicalculture at the time. In the next essay, Naoko Ono examines the gender ideology
observed in the rise of obstetrics in early twentieth century America. She discusses how the medical professionals dealing with childbirth perceived themselves and issues such as women and childbirth, maternal and infant mortality,and explains how obstetrics came to gain recognition as a specialty in the medical world and in the society at large. Rumi Yasutake takes up the topic of awomen’s movement promoting Christianity and temperance, and examines itfrom a transnational perspective. In “Men, Women, and Temperance in Meiji
Japan: Engendering WCTU Activism from a Transnational Perspective,” sheargues that the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, once implanted inJapan, became split into a women’s movement led by Japanese women, and atemperance movement led by Japanese progressive men. By examining theWorld WTCU organizers who visited Japan in the late nineteenth century,
Yasutake analyzes the process through which such transformations took place.
The essays by Yukako Hisada and Keiko Sugiyama reveal various experiences of women in American society. In “Between Factory and School: Women
School Teachers in Early Nineteenth-Century New England,” Hisada discusses
the social background that led to the feminization of teaching. By examining
the diaries and letters of women schoolteachers, she investigates the reasons
why rural young women were led to seek paid employment and why school
teaching remained respectable for middle class women. Sugiyama’s “Ellen N.
LaMotte, 1873–1961: Gender and Race in Nursing” traces LaMotte’s career as
nurse, journalist and author. By following her activities in Baltimore, Europeand China and examining her views on motherhood, imperialism, Christianity,and miscegenation, Sugiyama highlights how an independently minded andunconventional woman observed and engaged with the problems of American
society during her career.

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3The next two essays explore the relationship between gender and Americancitizenship. In “Gender and American Citizenship: The Construction of ‘Our
Nation’ in the Early Twentieth Century,” Yuko Matsumoto analyzes theAmericanization movement, the anti-Japanese campaign, and the reaction ofthe Japanese immigrant community to such movements in early twentieth century California, and concludes that a “home built upon the American standardof living” was one of the requirements for American citizenship and that gender roles at home were critical in the construction of American nationalism.
Chieko Kitagawa Otsuru’s “Re-Gendering Citizenship in Post 9–11 America”
suggests the relevance of a similar theme a century later. Examining the way inwhich the Bush administration is mobilizing society in a “war against terror,”she argues that what American society is experiencing today is the stratiﬁcation of the political sphere and civil society, and a move away from a gender
neutral civil society to a re-gendered conception of American citizenship.
The next two contributions by Taeko Kitahara and Yoshiko Uzawa discuss
gender, as well as race and sexuality, as represented in literature. In “Framing
the Supernatural: Henry James and F. Marion Crawford,” Kitahara deals withtwo pairs of “framed ghost stories” and concludes that this frame device enabled
the authors not only to experiment with the supernatural genre but also to explore deeper, taboo issues related to gender and sexuality. Uzawa’s paper entitled “Will White Man and Yellow Man Ever Mix? Wallace Irwin, Hashimura
Togo, and the Japanese Immigrant in America” gives a multilayered analysisof the character Hashimura Togo, an imaginary Japanese schoolboy created by
the Anglo-American author Wallace Irwin. She points out that by taking advantage of the minstrel tradition and utilizing the Oriental persona, Irwin sought toquestion the assumptions of white middle class society. Furthermore, when
Hollywood actor Sessue Hayakawa personiﬁed Hashimura in a silent ﬁlm,
Hayakawa introduced to the character a sexuality and exoticism that was absent
from the original novel, which, Uzawa points out, represented Hayakawa’s
effort to ﬁnd a way out of American Orientalism.
The paper by Joshua Paul Dale, “Intact or Cut? Castration and the Phallus in
the New Gender Politics,” confronts the question of sexuality through an examination of identity politics surrounding castration and eunuchs. Employing theLacanian concepts of the “phallus and jouissance,” he reexamines the idea of
new gender politics in the light of those people whose demand for recognition
poses an ethical challenge for the rest of the community.
The last two papers, by Tomoko Nakashima and Yasuhiro Katagiri, deal withart and politics respectively. “Deﬁning ‘Japanese Art’ in America” by Nakashima
compares “Japanese Art” as it was conceived differently in America and inJapan. She argues that while the Japanese sought to locate their art within thewestern notion of “art,” Americans conceived and “discovered” Japanese art

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within a framework of non-Western art, thus ethnologically imagining and commercially re-creating “Japanese art” in the process. In “ ‘Let the Word Go Forth’:John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Rhetoric on Civil Rights during the South’s
Second Reconstruction,” Katagiri examines Kennedy’s speeches along with hisother remarks on issues of race in the early 1960s and concludes that although
the process was not without roadblocks, Kennedy came to understand what wasat stake in the civil rights movement and initiated an irreversible process forthe advancement of race relations in the United States.
The publication of the Journal is supported in part by a grant-in-aid for thePublication of Scientiﬁc Research Results from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, for which we are deeply grateful. Most of the articles published in the Japanese Journal of American Studies, including those from backissues, are now freely available on the internet (http://www.jaas.gr.jp). We
invite responses and criticisms from our readers and hope that the journal willcontinue to be an important medium for American Studies across both disciplinary and national boundaries.

FUMIKO NISHIZAKI
Editor

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 300 words) by
mid-January. We are unable to accept the manuscript without
this procedure.
3. The ﬁnal manuscript (maximum 7000 words including notes)
is due early May. The editorial committee will inform eachcontributor of the result of the selection process by the end ofJune. If accepted, the paper will be published in June the following year.
4. The fall issue of the JAAS Newsletter will carry a “call forpapers” announcement with exact deadlines and the special
theme for the forthcoming issue.
5. The JAAS will accept inquiries through email:ofﬁce@jaas.gr.jp