The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 26 (2015)

Editor’s Introduction

This year’s Japanese Journal of American Studies carries “Family”
as its special topic. The topic was selected in 2013 (when the Supreme
Court ruled the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional), but its
relevancy has not waned after two years.
In April 2015, we were told by John Stamos (“Uncle Jessie”) that a
new spin-off series of Full House—named Fuller House, appropriately—is coming to Netflix in 2016. The legendary original sitcom, set in San
Francisco of all places, presented an iconic American family to viewers
all over the world, and gave a good sense of how a house can be “full” inAmerica. The show experimented, even while reinforcing classic family
values, with the idea of an expanded family, where friends and relatives
comes to give each other a hand in child rearing. With any luck the new
spin-off will provide an updated—and fuller—image of how America
is changing and developing the concept of a family in the twenty-firstcentury.
Then about a week after the Fuller House announcement, the Supreme
Court justices were reported to be divided over the same-sex marriage
ban imposed in some states. In the Obergefell v. Hodges session, in which
they heard the legal arguments from both sides of the same-sex marriage
debate, one of the justices, Anthony Kennedy, said, “It’s very difficult forthe court to say . . . we know better,” showing qualms about the Court
altering the traditional definition of marriage. Another justice, Samuel
Alito, was more concerned about polygamous marriage making its way
into society if gay marriage is found to be valid under the Constitution.
These justices are apparently afraid that a legal decision, being artificial atbest, might somehow undermine the age-old institution of marriage, whichis considered by some to be the linchpin of human society.
But, as Amy Davidson of the New Yorker clarifies (in “Justice Alito’sPolygamy Perplex,” April 30, 2015), the situation is not that simple. If1

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Naochika Takao

the current gay-marriage ban in, say, Tennessee is upheld, a gay man
can legally marry another man in New York, move to Tennessee (wheresuch a conjugation is void), and then legally marry a woman, allowing
a polygamous relationship even under current law. Preserving the legal
status quo, with some states able to void out-of-state marriages, there isalready room for hypothetically legal polygamy. The present situation
can be even worse than Justice Alito fears. He might as well echo Uncle
Jessie’s favorite line, a la Elvis: “Have mercy!”
Attempts to change the definition of marriage (and in consequencethat of a family), however, have been made throughout the history of theUnited States, starting with the Oneida community and the Mormons.
These groups, along with other experimental communities, tried to expand
the boundaries of what constitutes a family. Immigration and racism also
have given rise to the most excruciating and grueling question about
the status of a family in society. In a sense, “family” has always beenon America’s mind. Looking at various aspects of the concept of family
throughout the history of United States, this year’s Journal gives a full
picture of how the institution has developed in democratic and capitalisticsociety.
Let me give a brief review of what is in this issue.
The first two essays, one by Nam Gyun Kim, former president of theAmerican Studies Association of Korea, and the other by Jun Furuya,
former president of the JAAS, are based on lectures given at JAAS’s 48th
annual convention held in Okinawa last year. To hear about the birthsof the two kindred associations, ASAK and JAAS, in Okinawa was amemorable experience, and we are honored to include these lectures inour journal this year. Though the two essays are not directly related toour special topic, we sincerely hope that this publication will become an
important step toward building a fruitful relationship between the twoassociations as part of a family of kindred-minded scholars.
The essays following the two presidential addresses are roughly arranged
in chronological order by their topics. First comes Masahiko Narita’s “ThePhenomenology of Family-Killing Fatherhood: Charles Brockden Brown’sWieland; or the Transformation: An American Tale and Dubious Reason
in the Early American Republic.” Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; orthe Transformation: An American Tale is a story of a gruesome familicidecommitted by an insane father, which was greatly influenced by a true
story of upstate New York farmer James Yates’s atrocious murders of his

Editor’s Introduction

3wife and children in 1781. Narita argues that Brown faithfully depicted
how drastically changed was the moral landscape of Revolutionary
America. At that time, under the powerful sway of “reason,” the traditional
fatherly authority and closely knit emotional ties among family members
were rapidly disintegrating. Narita reads the fall of the Wieland family asa representative case in which too much trust in reason caused irrational
violence and chaos in the human psyche, and in the fledgling republic.
Next comes Takuya Nishitani’s essay on another famous Americanauthor, Herman Melville. In “Melville’s Experiment with Domestic Fictionin ‘The Apple-Tree Table,’” Nishitani turns to Melville’s short story “TheApple-Tree Table” (1856), which has been relegated to obscurity andhas been thought, even by Melville scholars, to be far less serious thanhis other work, at most an entertaining light comedy. Nishitani argues,
however, that the story is one of Melville’s masterpieces, especially inits art of narration. By examining how Melville critically used the modeof domestic fiction and recast the conventions of the genre, Nishitani
convincingly shows that the story contains, in its recesses, a vein of dark
pessimism about domestic life in mid-nineteenth-century America.
We then move to the topic of immigration in Miya ShichinoheSuga’s “Japanese Interracial Families in the United States, 1879–1900:
What the Census Manuscript Population Schedules Reveal.” In thisessay, Shichinohe-Suga discusses Japanese immigrants who chose toform international, interracial, and sometimes multicultural families
in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the turn of thetwentieth century. Her essay is based mainly on population schedules ashistorical resources. She explores records from 1870, 1880, and 1900 on
the mainland, mostly in California and New York State, and in doing so,
Shichinohe-Suga illuminates the characteristics of early Japanese interracial
families by examining their patterns, demographic distribution, and therace categorization of interracial couples and their multiracial children.
Rie Makino’s “Absent Presence as a Nonprotest Narrative: Internment,Interethnicity, and Christianity in Hisaye Yamamoto’s ‘The EskimoConnection’” investigates Hisaye Yamamoto’s portrayal of the JapaneseAmerican subject as an “absent presence” in her lat work, “The EskimoConnection.” The 1970s, in which the story was published, was thedecade of ethnic protests, and there were two movements, the JapaneseAmerican Redress movement and the American Indian Movement, thatemphasized the ethnic unity of Native Americans and Japanese Americans.
Yamamoto’s narrative in this short story, according to Makino, effectively

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illuminates the Japanese American subject, which resisted adopting
both the ethnic protests in the 1970s and Christianity as used in the US
discourse of national ideology. Makino argues, by highlighting both thepresence and absence of the Japanese American subject, that Yamamotouses Christian discourse as a parameter of national ideology to visualize or(in-visualize) American ethnicity.
Akira Hongo wrestles with the questions surrounding a gay family in
Broadway musicals. His “Family and Four American Gay Playwrights”
focuses on how gay playwrights have tackled the question of “family.” Toemphasize the present situation and show the change that has graduallytaken place in America, Hongo discusses four plays staged on Broadway,
moving backward into the past. These are: Terrence McNally’s Love!
Valour! Compassion! (1994), Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy(1979), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), andTennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945). The first two plays,
Hongo argues, challenged the heteronormative family by showing
an extended family based on friendship and integrating a biologicalfamily and a gay family; the latter two criticize, he further elucidates,
the heteronormative ideal of a uniform nuclear family by using playingand “camp,” and by using a narrator who refuses the ideal but loves hisbiological family.
Coming to one of the most debated questions surrounding the family inAmerica, Chitose Sato’s “‘Mixed-Status Families’ in the Age of Welfare
Reform” addresses the question of welfare and immigrant (or “mixedstatus”) families. In the United States, the number of mixed-status families,
which consist of immigrant parents and children who are US-born citizens,has rapidly increased over the last decade. Sato analyzes how mixed-statusfamilies have created a complicated category of welfare recipients, often
referred to as child-only cases, in which undocumented immigrant parents
receive public assistance through their citizen children. This increase in
the number of child-only cases with undocumented immigrant parents,
Sato notes, moves anti-immigration forces to regard this phenomenon
as a serious threat to white middle-class taxpayers. Sato’s answer tothe question of whether undocumented immigrants are abusing welfare
benefits through their citizen children is in the negative.
Finally, addressing another of the most discussed questions, Ayumu
Kaneko’s “The Same-Sex Marriage in the Age of Neoliberalism” looks at amostly ignored connection between politics and gay marriage. Legalizationof same-sex marriage in the United States has made significant progressEditor’s Introduction

5in part due to efforts of the marriage-equality movement, which promotes
equality between married heterosexual couples and same-sex couples.
Kaneko argues that the movement has enticed gays and lesbians to
assimilate into mainstream society (which idealizes the middle-classnuclear family), emphasizing that the legal marital relationship is theprimary institution of safety, security and stability. Kaneko concludes that
this idea has reinforced the neoliberal concept of governance in which theresponsibility for providing a safety net should be transferred from thepublic sector to the private sphere of intimacy and domesticity.
As always, I would like to thank Katy Meigs for her continuing
assistance as copy editor for the journal and Shizue Kaminuma for her
unwavering support in materializing this journal. They are, indeed, partof our family. Most of the articles published in the Japanese Journal ofAmerican Studies, including those from back issues, are freely available
on the Internet (http://www.jaas.gr.jp). We invite responses and criticisms
from our readers and hope that the journal will continue to be an important
player in the field of American Studies.
Naochika Takao
Editor