The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 10 (1999)

Editor’s Introduction

TENTH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE
We are celebrating the publication of this tenth anniversary issue
with good reason. Readers may respond with the simple words, “whyonly the tenth?” Believe it or not, however, it took almost twenty years
to plan, collect manuscripts, edit, and publish our ﬁrst ten issues of theJapanese Journal of American Studies.
I would like to recommend readers to glance over the tables of contents of past issues at the end of this volume. The ﬁrst issue was published in 1981 under the leadership of the ﬁrst editor, Tadashi Aruga.
No doubt, we JAAS (Japanese Association for American Studies)
members owe him a great deal. In his day it must have taken a coupleof years to publish one volume. The editor was fully involved in theorganizing of the special topics. Additionally, the editorial committee
made every effort so that the directions of contemporary Japanesescholarship in Japanese on the theme could be introduced to foreignscholars. In volume one, for instance, Sadao Asada provided a detailed
historiography regarding U. S. policy toward East Asia just afterWorld War II. In volumes two and three, Tadashi Aruga provided similar historiograpies summarizing Japanese scholars’ works related toeach topic. Up until the third volume, the activities of the JAAS, focusing on the annual meetings, were recorded. Before 1994, the annual
periodical of our Association, Amerika Kenkyu [or the American
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Review], whose papers were mostly written in Japanese, accepted acouple of articles written in English.
The editorial policy of our Journal drastically changed under theleadership of the second editor, Shinichi Shigihara, i.e., 1991 through1996. First, the publication became biennial, and then annual. Special
topics were selected each time from among the sessions of the annual
meetings rather than chosen by the editorial board, and in addition
members were encouraged to submit their papers on other topics aswell. A substantial portion of our activities was occupied by the editing and polishing of original manuscripts, including those of invitedarticles.
Eiichi Akimoto succeeded as the third editor in 1997. Now we havearrived at the tenth issue, for which Mary Helen Washington andHitoshi Abe contributed papers originally given as presidential addresses at the annual meeting of our Association held at Chiba University in June 1998. Washington, then the president of the American
Studies Association, redeﬁned black literary history in the 1950s by
examining the works and activities of Frank London Brown. She takes
up Brown’s autobiographical novel Trumbull Park, of 1959 and suggests that it is necessary for us to change the way we read the literarywork of black writers. Hitoshi Abe, the political scientist and then thepresident of the JAAS, challenged the comparison of democracy inJapan and the United States. Minshushugi is the Japanese translationof “democracy.” According to Abe’s formulation, one of the defects ofJapanese democracy originates in its lack of the American republican tradition. Local governments in Japan have a poor tradition of the“direct democracy” often found abundantly in America. Since Japanese
democracy failed to learn certain aspects of American tradition, as Abe
argues, there are substantial problems to be solved in her politics.
On the other hand, American people have certain value systems andpatterns of behavior which continue to challenge the cultural understanding of the United States by foreigners including the Japanese.
That was one of the reasons why we selected “Taboo in AmericanSociety” as the main theme of this issue. We had a session on thissame theme at the annual meeting last June and two panelists contributed their papers. Masaru Okamoto looked back on the changing
focus of the temperance movement in “The Changing Meaning ofWhat Was Considered to be ‘Taboo’ in the History of the Temperance
Movement.” Okamoto argues that as the implications of alcohol abuse

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shifted from individual to social, so the justiﬁcation or motivation of
the temperance movement shifted from preventing moral to social evils.
Noriko Hirabayashi traced the process of President Clinton’s antitobacco campaign from 1995 through 1998 in “President Clinton’s
Strategies for Communications in the 1998 Tobacco Debate.” Sheintroduces a new notion of political communication strategies in analyzing the successes and failures of Clinton politics.
Three more people participated in writing on the “taboo” issue. In“The Puritan Origins of American Taboo,” Naoki Onishi begins hisanalysis by explaining how the word “taboo,” which originated in
Polynesia, was transmitted to America in the late eighteenth century.
Before that, colonial New England society showcased the taboo concept in examining sexual crimes such as adultery or sodomy. Onishi
concludes that the court showed generosity in actual judgements,
which contrasts with the strict image of the Puritan society. In “RacialBoundaries and Stereotypes: An Analysis of American Advertising,”
Yasuko Takezawa takes up issues in advertising during the 1920s and1930s and illustrates the explicit or implicit expression of racial
boundaries there, especially in the white/minorities relationship. Herwork also refers to statistical sources. Atsushi Yoshida approaches
taboo from the perspective of the drawings of Reginald Marsh in“Portraying the American Taboo: The Down and Out in Reginald
Marsh’s Oeuvre.” According to Yoshida, Marsh formed his images
from the real situation of homeless people during the Great Depression
in the 1930s, visualizing poverty in art. On general topics, Ayako
Uchida contributed a paper on “The Protestant Mission and Native
American Response: The Case of the Dakota Mission, 1835–1862.”
Uchida traces the process of Protestant missionary activities that ﬁnally culminated in the disintegration of Indian culture.
The publication of the Journal is supported in part by a grant-in-aid
for the Publication of Scientiﬁc Research Results from the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science, for which we are deeply grateful. 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 AkimotoEditor4AKIMOTO

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 manuscript without this procedure.
3. The ﬁnal manuscript (maximum 9000 words includingnotes) is due early May. The editorial committee will
inform each contributor of the result of the selection
process by the end of June. 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:jaas-exe@ab.inbox.ne.jp