The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 23 (2012)

Editor’s Introduction“Race” and “ethnicity” are two concepts whose deﬁnitions are constantly
contested, by academics as well as the public at large, and often fraught with
confusion. This is in part because they are not clearly delineated concepts eventhough they play an integral role in deﬁning our individual and collective identities. Another reason for contention and misunderstanding is that categorizing
people in these terms is often considered a way of exercising power and control, and as such it is always political. Moreover, even among academics, there
are varied ways of understanding the relationship between these two terms.
Some see them as totally different categories, while others deem them practically the same thing. Still others consider race merely a subset of ethnicity.
The unstable nature of these terms poses a challenge to any interdisciplinary
attempt to compile a group of articles on related subjects, and yet it does provide
an arena for fruitful discussion. The present volume of the Japanese Journal of
American Studies takes up “race and ethnicity” as its special theme and invites
its readers to explore the broad, ever-changing topography of the subject’s political, social, economic, and cultural implications. Although “race and ethnicity”
is a familiar topic in the area of studies of the United States, one of the mostrace-conscious countries in the world, new understandings of race and ethnicity
are continually developing in the wake of postcolonialism and the rapid changes
accompanying globalization. New approaches based on these understandings
often push us beyond the scope limited by geographical and national boundaries. I hope that dedicating this volume to such a familiar and yet controversial topic will prove worthwhile to the journal’s readers.
The ﬁrst article, Akiko Ochiai’s “Continuing Skirmishes in Harpers Ferry:
Entangled Memories of Heyward Shepherd and John Brown” focuses on amemorial dedicated to Hayward Shepherd, a free black who was the ﬁrst victim
of John Brown’s raid, as a site of contestation over the historical interpretationsof his death. The memorial was erected in 1931 in downtown Harpers Ferry,West Virginia, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The organization
claimed that Shepherd’s death epitomized condemnation of Brown’s violent
raid and African Americans’ loyalty to the Confederacy. This has outraged the1

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OTSUKANAACP and African American activists from the 1930s until today. Ochiai
traces the history of the struggle over the interpretation of Shepherd’s andBrown’s memories and sheds light on the difﬁculties involved in presenting thehistory of the raid to the public, especially in the post-9/11 sociopolitical atmosphere.
The second article, “Excludable Aliens vs. One National People: The U.S.
Chinese Exclusion Policy and the Racialization of Chinese in the United States
and China” by Motoe Sasaki, takes up the ﬁrst few decades of the Chinese exclusion era, a period in which the U.S. Chinese exclusion policy increased in severity, culminating in a massive anti-American boycott movement in China in1905. By tracing the intensiﬁcation process of the Chinese exclusion policy,
Sasaki demonstrates the ways in which the Chinese, seen as an unassimilable
alien race, became a reference point for assessing eligibility for membership in
the U.S. nation. She also explores how the emerging notion of the Chinese as
one race and one people, which was promoted by Chinese reformers and revolutionaries, mobilized thousands of Chinese to protest U.S. immigration policy.
In so doing, Sasaki elucidates how the two notions of the Chinese—as an unassimilable alien race in the United States and as one national people in China—
were transnationally linked by means of the notion of “race” in conjunction withthat of “survival,” both of which were informed by social Darwinist thought.
Brian Masaru Hayashi’s “From Race to Nation: The Institute of Paciﬁc Relations, Asian Americans, and George Blakeslee, from 1908 to 1929” focuses on
the role of nongovernmental organizations in contributing to the rapid changes
in American racial and ethnic relations that took place during the two decades
after the end of World War II. Hayashi closely examines a founder of the Institute of Paciﬁc Relations, George H. Blakeslee, professor of History and International Relations at Clark University. As co-editor of the Journal of Race
Development Blakeslee lobbied for the revision of the 1924 Immigration Act
that discriminated against Asians and Asian Americans and supported studies
by Roderick D. McKenzie, Eliot G. Mears, and Carey McWilliams, all of whom
advocated widening the civil and social rights of Asian Americans prior toWorld War II. Blakeslee’s convictions both challenge and uphold the status quo
on issues of race and ethnicity. Hayashi argues that during the interwar years
Blakeslee’s view of the Chinese and Japanese, seen through the lens of social
Darwinist thought, coupled with his post–World War I acceptance of the nationstate, reﬂected how the professor and his colleagues in the inﬂuential instituteshifted increasingly away from “race” toward a concept of “nation” that emphasized political rather than physical commonalities.
In “From ‘Vanishing Race’ to Friendly Ally: Japanese American Perceptionsof Native Hawaiians during the Interwar Years” Hiromi Monobe examines how
the perceptions of Native Hawaiians by Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i shiftedfrom the late 1910s to the early 1940s. As part of their identity politics, theEDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

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immigrant generation (Issei) initially adopted Japanese intellectuals’ racial
views of Native Hawaiians, which were skewed by social Darwinism. Some
Issei, however, eventually developed more sympathetic views, seeing them as
minority members of the island community similar to themselves. Monobe
observes that by having more contact with Native Hawaiians on a daily basis,the second generation (Nisei) developed friendlier views of Hawaiians, considering them to be close acquaintances even to the point where certain Nisei
regarded Hawaiians as potential marriage partners and political allies.
Koichi Suwabe’s “Faulkner’s Black and White Oedipal Drama in ‘The Fireand the Hearth’ ” deals with the racially entangled drama of fathers and sons in
one of the stories included in Go Down, Moses by the twentieth-century Southern novelist, William Faulkner. Suwabe shows how the apparently heroic decision of Isaac (Ike) McCaslin, a grandson of the founder of the McCaslin plantation, to give up his patrimony—his right to inherit the plantation—invited
constant friction between part-black Lucas Beauchamp and white RothEdmonds, both of whom are his grandfather’s descendants. Suwabe contends
that in this oedipal drama, if Ike, as the last “man-made” white McCaslin, hadassumed the “right” position as a patriarch or “father” of the family, both Lucasand Roth would have found themselves comfortable as Ike’s “sons.” However,Ike declares that he is the “dead father” in the modern world. This death of thestrong “father,” Swabe suggests, caused the confusion and struggle of the “sons”
in the chaotic world.
Noriko Shimada’s “The Emergence of Okinawan Ethnic Identity in Hawai‘i:
Wartime and Postwar Experiences” is a case study of the way ethnic identity is
generated. In Hawai‘i, Naichi (immigrants from parts of Japan other than
Okinawa) and Okinawans (immigrants from Okinawa) are now treated as two
distinct ethnic groups. However, before World War II that was not the case.
Okinawans were regarded not as a separate ethnic group but as a subgroup ofJapanese immigrants. Shimada examines the way they emerged as a distinct
ethnic group through their experiences during and after World War II. She
argues that there are several important factors that contributed to generating ethnic pride and solidarity among Okinawans—notably, their liberation fromNaichi control, their increased wealth due to the wartime economic boom thatallowed them to contribute to the postwar relief effort for their devastated homeland, and the direct U.S. military control over Okinawa, which promoted in theminds of many Okinawans a sense of independence from Japan and, consequently, a stronger cultural identity.
In “America’s Racial Limits: U.S. Cinema and the Occupation of Japan”
Hiroshi Kitamura explores the Allied Occupation of Japan as a racial experience through the study of Hollywood cinema. In his view, while enacting a wide
range of reforms to demilitarize and “democratize” the former Axis enemy,
Douglas MacArthur’s Supreme Command for the Allied Powers imposed its

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OTSUKAown racial values on the Japanese. A chosen instrument of U.S. occupationaires, the U.S. ﬁlm industry generated a powerful publicity campaign that championed Hollywood as a “fountain of culture” (bunka no izumi). Yet, in so doing,
it presented the ideas and actions of whites as the norm, superior to those of
nonwhites. The process of presenting whiteness involved the erasure of European ethnic markers and the marginalization of African Americans and Native
Americans. In the end, according to Kitamura, these discursive endeavors reinforced America’s hegemonic inﬂuence over Japan while enhancing Hollywood’s
business across the Paciﬁc.
Tasuku Todayama’s “Transnational Labor Activism against Migrant Labor:
The Post–World War II U.S.-Mexican Labor Alliance for Border Control”
traces the formation and demise of transnational labor cooperation and its political context during the two decades after World War II. Drawing on diplomaticrecords from Mexico and the United States, Todayama examines the impact of
the Bracero Program on U.S. and Mexican unions as well as the developmentof their alliance as a reaction to it. He suggests that the U.S. government was
not the sole actor in deﬁning who “illegal” immigrants were, but rather that both
Mexican and U.S. labor unions played an integral role in the process of curbing undocumented Mexican migration in order to protect Mexican and U.S.
workers. Todayama also points out the difﬁculties and limits of the transnational labor cooperation that led to its eventual demise.
In “Ethnic Community, Party Politics, and the Cold War: The Political Ascendancy of Miami Cubans, 1980–2000” Hideaki Kami focuses on Cuban
immigrants in Miami (Miami Cubans), who, among the growing Hispanic electorate in the United States, have most successfully gained political inﬂuence.
Kami argues that despite this growth in their inﬂuence, their political ascendancy was far from predetermined and that the early 1980s was the turning pointin their political history. To prove this, he details the intense and noteworthyinteractions between the Cold War, national political party politics, and ethnic
awareness among Miami Cubans. His analysis illuminates how voters and politicians of Cuban descent began to engage the U.S. political system for theirown ends and the ways in which their early experiences outlined their politicalactivities thereafter.
Ayako Uchida’s “Searching for Indigenous Alliances: International NGOsof the United States and Canada in the 1970s” takes up the resurgence of indigenous activism in the United States and Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, andexplores the internationalization of indigenous movements in the 1970s by
focusing on the formation of the International Indian Treaty Council and theWorld Council of Indigenous Peoples, as well as the 1977 International NGO
Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas,
held in Geneva. Through the analysis of these indigenous movements, which
originated in the United States and Canada, Uchida assesses their historical sig-

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

5niﬁcance, particularly their role in building an international indigenous networkin the 1970s as a new form of ethnic empowerment.
Keiko Miyamoto’s “Toni Morrison and Kara Walker: The Interaction of
Their Imaginations” explores Toni Morrison’s inﬂuence on Kara Walker’s visual arts, focusing on Morrison’s historiographical love trilogy—Beloved (1987),
Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998)—and Walker’s silhouettes. Miyamoto points
out strong afﬁnities between Walker’s visualization of traumatic history andMorrison’s writing, especially in its representations of motherhood under slavery, the myths of the antebellum South, and the cultural and social constructionof race and gender. In so doing, she argues that while Walker’s art has developed
under the inﬂuence of Morrison, Morrison’s writing also responds to Walker’s
art. In the interaction of their imaginations, Miyamoto ﬁnds, both artists sharethe difﬁcult task of speaking about the unspeakable in African American history.
In “The Sociopolitical Role of the Black Church in Post–Civil Rights Era
America” Makoto Kurosaki offers an analytical overview of the Black Churchand discusses sociopolitical issues that the contemporary Black Church is facing. He highlights the following aspects in particular: the overall decline of theBlack Church’s leadership in social activism, its stance toward the full ordination of women and open acceptance of homosexuals, and its relation to unchurched black youth in the inner cities, including the negative impact of therise of “the prosperity gospel” on this particular group. Kurosaki argues that thecontemporary Black Church has increasingly come under pressure as to whether
it can effectively address the often-interlocking issues of race, class, gender,and sexuality. In all cases, he concludes, black churches have been involved indialectical tensions between resistant prophetic voices and conservative forces,
which, in fact, help the Black Church to constantly redeﬁne and revitalize itsrole in trying to meet the challenges of the twenty-ﬁrst century.
The last article of the present volume, “Finding, Reclaiming, and Reinventing
Identity through DNA: The DNA Trail” by Yuko Kurahashi, features an experimental theater project, The DNA Trail: A Genealogy of Short Plays about
Ancestry, Identity, and Utter Confusion (2011). This work is a collection ofseven ﬁfteen-to-twenty minute plays by veteran Asian American playwrights
whose plays have been staged nationally and internationally since the 1980s.
The plays include Philip Kan Gotanda’s “Child Is Father to Man,” Velina Hasu
Houston’s “Mother Road,” David Henry Hwang’s “A Very DNA Reunion,”
Elizabeth Wong’s “Finding Your Inner Zulu,” Shishir Kurup’s “Bolt from theBlue,” Lina Patel’s “That Could Be You,” and Jamil Khoury’s “WASP: White
Arab Slovak Pole.” Kurahashi examines the initial impetus for the project, its
relevance to changing identity politics, and changes in the participants’ original expectations due to the limited information provided by the DNA tests, allof which affected the focus of their short plays and these subjects’ relation to6

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cultural and racial identity formation in the United States. In so doing, shedemonstrates how the plays in The DNA Trail, overtly or covertly, address thequestions of cultural and biological identity among “hyphenated” populationsin the United States.
The publication of the Japanese Journal of American Studies is supported inpart by a grant-in-aid for the Publication of Scientiﬁc Research Results fromthe 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 of the 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 fromour readers and hope that the journal will continue to be an important medium
for American Studies across both disciplinary and national boundaries.

JURO OTSUKA
Editor

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3. The ﬁnal manuscript (maximum 8,000 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.
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papers” announcement with exact deadlines and the special
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