The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 22 (2011)

Editor’s Introduction

The special topic of this volume of the Japanese Journal of American Studies
is “Affluence and Poverty.” The question of how an interdisciplinary academic
journal such as ours could find common ground for its readers on a topic likethis is an intriguing one. A constructive step to take is to conceptualize and contextualize the oppositional terms—“being poor” and “being rich”—in a way thatenables the readers to grasp the complex nature of the issue. The contributors tothe present volume, in one way or another, attempt to grapple with this task andin so doing present us directly or indirectly with important questions. For instance, what does it mean to “be poor” in one of the wealthiest nations in theworld, where people rarely die of starvation or from the lack of other resources?
Another important question, especially for students and researchers, is why therich receive disproportionately less scholarly attention than the poor, despite
their undoubtedly having tremendous political and cultural influence in American society. Yet another and related question is whether there are any organic
relations between affluence and poverty, a pair of conditions that tend to be conceptualized as distinct from one another? By posing these questions that defy
simplistic answers, we invite our readers to consider and take up positions in thefruitful discussions for which these articles advocate.
The first two articles are not related to the volume’s special theme. They arebased on the presidential addresses delivered at the 44th annual meeting of theJapanese Association of American Studies (JAAS) held in June 2010 at OsakaUniversity. “Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and the ‘Long CivilRights Movement’ ” by Kevin Gaines, the president of the American Studies Association, places Wonder’s seminal album Songs in the Key of Life in the context
of what recent historians call the “long civil rights movement.” Through analysis of its musical style, lyrics, and historical contexts, Gaines illustrates how
Wonder’s album, much like the enduring African American voices of Martin
Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin, impacts the listeners by presenting a prophetic vision of community—a kind of vision that transcends racial, cultural,religious, and even national boundaries and differences.
The second essay, “Is a Japanese Standpoint Useful for Studying about Amer1

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ica?: Child Labor during World War II Revealed in Comparative Perspective”
by the president of the JAAS, Natsuki Aruga, reaffirms the usefulness of comparative history, which has lately been overshadowed by the trend of transnationalization within the field of American studies. Aruga suggests a broader
concept of comparative history and demonstrates its usefulness by making acomparison of how child labor was viewed in the United States and in Japan
during World War II and showing how these views affected the ways historians
have dealt with the problem. In the end, Aruga proposes that historians make aconscious use of a comparative perspective so that their studies become indeed
transnational.
The following nine articles are dedicated to this issue’s special theme, “Affluence and Poverty.” In the first essay, “ ‘Povertiresque’: The Representation ofIrish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America,” Mikayo Sakuma focuses on
how American Renaissance writers Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville
depicted the poverty of the Irish immigrants who came to America, spurred by
the great potato famine. Sakuma argues that both writers, while witnessing thedivisive slavery debates and the rise of nativism, were arrested by the poverty of
the Irish, and that their textual representation of the immigrants elevated economic poverty to a cultural phenomenon. Thus, she concludes, this historic immigration boom provided American writers with a broader understanding ofpoverty and its culture.
In “Perceptions of Poverty in Progressive Era Chicago,” Kotaro Nakano contextualizes poverty discourse within historical developments at the turn of thetwentieth century, including mass immigration and the formation of the colorline, and explores the character of nation building along with its unique processof stratification and stigmatization. Middle-class intellectuals of that period regarded “poverty” as a preventable social problem rather than a personal moral
issue, and yet they also represented the emerging ethos of separating the dependent as, in Jacob Riis’s term, “the other half.” This testifies to the fact, Nakano
argues, that the discourses of poverty at that time were informed by Americans’concerns about economic destitution as well as their increasing dread of ethnic
and racial subcultures.
The next two articles bring us back to American literature. In “Creating aCulture of Wealth in The Great Gatsby,” Tetsuro Uenishi regards Fitzgerald’s
novel as a skillful representation of the transformation in the culture of wealth,namely, the democratization of the rich, in the United States during the first
three decades of the twentieth century. Behind the modest self-portrait of thenarrator Nick Carraway as “poor” and having to work, Uenishi sees a figure
who tried in vain to follow this new trend of democratization that was prevalent
among the rich of the time. What Jay Gatsby represents, Uenishi contends, isNick’s failure in his ambition to become the champion of this new culture
among the rich.

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The other literature article, Kazuhiko Goto’s “Reading William Faulkner’s As
I Lay Dying as a Poverty Narrative,” reconsiders the recent trend in American
literary criticism of exploring how literature can contribute to the conceptualization of “poverty” as a category of social marginalization. According to Goto,
this trend goes so far as to consider it morally necessary for a literary critic tounmask lamentable blind spots in a society’s structure by criticizing a literarytext for not indicting such a society. In his analysis of Faulkner’s first successfulattempt at a poverty narrative, As I Lay Dying, Goto demonstrates that by appealing to the reader’s sense of pathos, a literary text can focus on poverty not
as a socioeconomic phenomenon but as a universally potential fate, and thereby
allow the reader to vicariously experience what it is like to be poor.
In “Poverty, Education, and National Policy in the ‘Affluent Society’: AComparison of the United States and Japan in the 1960s,” Ichiro Kuraishi compares the U.S. Elementary Secondary Education Act and Japan’s Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects and traces the process through which the national governments of the United States and Japan decided to take action toresolve the extremely difficult social problems of poverty and discrimination
among their minority populations. In so doing, Kuraishi demonstrates that despite some slight differences, a similar transformation of recognition took placein both cases on the part of national governments and that education played animportant role in the efforts to resolve the paradox of being poor in an affluent
society.
Kazuyo Tsuchiya in “ ‘Jobs or Income Now!’: Work, Welfare, and Citizenshipin Johnnie Tillmon’s Struggles for Welfare Rights” examines the case of Johnnie Tillmon, who in 1963 established one of the first organizations created byand for the nation’s welfare recipients who were, and still are, labeled as the“undeserving poor.” She fought for both “decent jobs with adequate pay” andadequate income to support the lives of welfare recipients. By establishing asystem that guaranteed women’s autonomy in decision making as to whether
they would work outside or stay home or both, Tillmon contested the narrow
definitions of “work” and “welfare,” the very premises on which the American
welfare state had been built. Tsuchiya also argues that for Tillmon and her allies
welfare rights signified a series of entitlements as citizens, and that the welfare
rights movement was thus a struggle for recognition as fully entitled membersof postwar American society.
We cannot discuss the issue of affluence and poverty without paying due attention to race and ethnicity. “The Fight for Indian Employment Preference in
the Bureau of Indian Affairs: Red Power Activism in Denver, Colorado, andMorton v. Mancari” by Azusa Ono focuses on one of the political and legal battles of Native Americans during the height of the Red Power movement in thelate 1960s and early 1970s. More specifically, she focuses on the Red Power
activism—voicing grievances and taking some militant actions—staged in4OTSUKA

Denver against discrimination in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the subsequent lawsuits that determined the future of the Indian preference policy. Onoargues that the combination of Red Power activities, which involved both local
and national Indian organizations as well as legal tactics, led to the confirmationof Indian preference in federal employment and showed the Indian people’s will
to take control over their lives.
In “The Japanese American ‘Success Story’ and the Intersection of Ethnicity,
Race, and Class in the Post–Civil Rights Era,” Fuminori Minamikawa takes up
the “success story” of Japanese Americans as an ethnoracial group in the postcivil rights era and explores how ethnicity, race, and class are intertwined in thediscourse of such a success story. Minamikawa’s approach is based on ethnoracial formation theory, which seeks to deal with the conceptual relationship ofethnicity and race in a particular historical context and points to a new directionin the sociological discourse of success.
In “Fair Price for Whom?: A Critique of Fairness and Justice in the Albany
Park Workers’ Rights Campaign,” by focusing on a particularly problematic
campaign during the first decade of this century by the Latino Union of Chicago, Satomi Yamamoto examines how the concepts of “fair price” and “fair labor” are interpreted differently by immigrant workers, Workers’ Center organizers, employers, and community residents, and observes that because the idea offairness was an unexplored cultural concept invoked by Workers’ Center organizers, the Albany Park Workers’ Center did not give sufficient critical thought
to the possibility that these expressions could generate misconceptions about
their program for day laborers. As a result, she contends, the Center created themisleading impression that it was trying to appropriate day labor employment inthe neighborhood of Chicago in which the Center operated.
This issue of the Journal presents several approaches to the special topic froma wide range of disciplines; we hope that, taken together, these articles constitute a significant contribution to the current critical conversations on affluenceand poverty in American Studies.
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. We would also like to acknowledge Katy Meigs for her assistance as copy editor for this issue. Most ofthe articles published in the Japanese Journal of American Studies, including
those from back issues, are now freely available on the Internet (http://www.
jaas.gr.jp). We invite responses and criticisms from our readers and hope thatthe journal will continue to be an important medium for American Studies
across both disciplinary and national boundaries.
JURO OTSUKAEditor

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For those who wish to submit a manuscript to the Japanese Journalof 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) bymid-January. We are unable to accept the manuscript without
this procedure.
3. The final manuscript (maximum 8000 words including notes) isdue 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 followingyear.
4. The fall issue of the JAAS Newsletter will carry a “call for papers” announcement with exact deadlines and the special theme
for the forthcoming issue.
5. The JAAS will accept inquiries through email:office@jaas.gr.jp

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