The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 25 (2014)

Editor’s Introduction

The idea of “dissent” in relation to the United States might seem like an
oxymoron. After all, the states are “united”—that is, the Unites States isknown as a country where consensus building is a traditional fact of life,and “the rites of assent,” to use the title of Sacvan Bercovitch’s famous
book, have historically been observed by all parties, even if grudgingly.
On the other hand, “dissent” in relation to the United States might seem
redundant. The name of the nation virtually stands for the land of freeenterprise and the home of brave exploiters. In 1929, the American critic
Newton Arvin enumerated the country’s “grand types of personality,”
which included “the Protestant sectarian, determined to worship his own
God even in the wilderness,” “the sectional patriot and the secessionist,”“the go-getter, the tax-dodger, [and] the bootlegger,” as well as “the claimjumper, the Mormon, [and] the founder of communities.” He concluded
that these citizens were all “united . . . in paying the penalty for disunion—
in becoming partial and lopsided personalities, men and women of one
dimension, august or vulgar cranks” (Hawthorne [Boston: Little, 1929],203–04). When looked at this way, Americans can be seen as united in theunderstanding that they are a nation of dissenters.
The judgment that Americans are self-centered individualists may be abit harsh. However, the recent example of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, one of whom was found guilty of felony assault against a police
officer, shows the deep divide still extant in the nation of dissenters. If thereader is still not convinced that the United States is a nation where dissent
is part of the national story, reading this year’s issue of the Japanese
Journal of American Studies should be instructive. Here we have articles
about a samurai who ran away from home to gain the other shore of thePacific; a black poet who slipped off the surveillance of anti-Communist
Japanese authorities; a US government official who endeavored todocument the secretive Japanese emperor Hirohito to determine his degree12Naochika Takaoof responsibility for World War II (still a gravely divisive question inJapan); a Native American novelist who has put her pen to opposing
nuclear development in the United States and around the world; and amayor of a major US city who took advantage of the urban racial divide towin his post. This is a colorful list of representative Americans, alldissenting in one way or another.
As always, the essays are arranged roughly in chronological order by
their topics. Just one note: the last essay, by Chieko Kitagawa Otsuru, wassubmitted for the previous issue (No. 24) that had the special topic “War.”Due to circumstances for which the author was not responsible, it did not
make it into publication for that issue, and so we have included it in thisvolume a year later. Although written to address a totally different theme,
her essay describes disparate groups that may be understood as “dissenting” from official government policy in the United States.
Our current publication starts off with Gavin James Campbell’s “‘WeMust Learn Foreign Knowledge’: The Transpacific Education of a Samurai
Sailor, 1864–1865,” which describes a restless young samurai who in 1864
clandestinely left Japan (technically still under the shogunate) for America.
After a year’s voyage and unaccustomed labor on two American merchantships, he eventually hove into Boston harbor. Campbell’s essay examines
the samurai’s reactions to the shipboard world he had to adapt to as well as
how this encounter helped smooth his adjustment to American society
more generally. More than just one traveler’s tale, however, this samurai’s
sea voyage puts ships and sailors back at the center of early Japan-US
contact. After all, the first Americans to tread Japanese soil were
shipwrecked mariners who arrived only after naval engineers andnavigation experts made transpacific voyaging both possible and profitable.
Thus, sailors pioneered the transpacific relationship. The nature of theirwork and their maritime society meant that they represented a particularvariant of America, one that politicians, merchants, and reformers tried tomake fit familiar patters but often without success. Sailors lived mobile
lives in hybrid transnational spaces. Thus, while one samurai’s courageand curiosity eased his transition from Hakodate to Boston, so, too, didliving in the maritime society that first met him on his side of the Pacific.
Etsuko Taketani’s “‘Spies and Spiders’: Langston Hughes and theTranspacific Intelligence Dragnet” retraces the underground (and surface)routes that Langston Hughes—the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance—took in navigating, and at times slipping right through, theintelligence dragnets that endeavored to silence dissenters during his 1933

Editor’s Introduction

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trip to Asia. As Hughes recounted in his memoir I Wonder as I Wander(1956), having freshly arrived from Moscow via China to Japan in June
1933, he found himself the focus of Japanese authorities’ anti-Communist
paranoia, which resulted in his expulsion from the country on suspicion of
being a Soviet spy. Taketani compares facts gleaned from archival researchwith Hughes’s own retrospective account of his experience of beingharassed by police, which was published during the McCarthy era.
Hughes’s memoir significantly committed to public memory the secret war
on dissent in the 1930s, revealing it as a force that eerily shaped theinternational Cold War blueprint in Asia.
Haruo Iguchi’s “Psychological Warfare during the American Occupationof Japan: The Documentary Film Project of Shu Taguchi and BonnerFellers, 1949–1951” discusses how Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, who was
MacArthur’s psychological warfare chief, was involved in Japanese film
producer Shu Taguchi’s project to create a semi-documentary film basedon Fellers’s 1947 essay “Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender.” Iguchi
discusses the background and details regarding the attempt to create thefilm, and observes the reasons behind its failure to come to fruition. Inaddition to the controversy of portraying a living emperor in a movie, theproposed semi-documentary focused on the most controversial aspect ofJapanese history during wartime: the emperor’s degree of responsibility
for the war. Because of the divisiveness of this issue in Japanese society,the film project was probably doomed to fail. Still, Iguchi argues, the factthat General Headquarters approved the production of the film based onFellers’s article points to the potential usefulness of the movie forunderstanding psychological warfare as it continued in the Cold War.
In “Leslie Marmon Silko and Nuclear Dissent in the AmericanSouthwest,” Kyoko Matsunaga reads Silko’s first two novels, Ceremony(1977) and Almanac of the Dead (1991), as literary dissent against theimpact of nuclearism in the American Southwest during the Cold War. InCeremony, Silko subverts the detrimental influences of nuclear colonialism
by situating the colonial narrative within the Laguna Pueblo tribal
narrative. While Almanac of the Dead features a more apocalyptic tone
shaped by the legacy of the Cold War, Silko continues to contest thedestructive forces of colonial hegemony by promoting a transnational
indigenous movement.
“Black Power at the Polls: The Harold Washington Campaign of 1983
and the Demise of the Democratic Machine in Chicago” by Yasumasa
Fujinaga carries the theme of dissent into the political arena. Since the late

4Naochika Takao

1960s, the election of African American mayors in the largest cities of theUnited States has usually been characterized by a stark racial divide.
Chicago’s mayoral election campaign of 1983, which eventually led to thechoice of Harold Washington as the city’s first African American mayor,
was no exception. This essay places Harold Washington’s election in thehistory of the civil rights/black power movement as it punctuated thetroubled trajectory of American racial politics in the urban North. Itilluminates how Washington’s candidacy mobilized the dissident African
American electorate in Chicago while at the same time it invoked white
voters’ deep-rooted racial fears.
As mentioned, Chieko Kitagawa Otsuru’s “The US Domestic Front:
Politics over Displaced Iraqis” was originally intended for the previous
issue of this journal with the topic “War.” Wars incur multidimensional
consequences, but much attention is often paid to military and financial
aspects while the human costs tend to be underappreciated. Otsuru’s essay
focuses on the fate of Iraqi refugees, especially those who ended up livingin American communities, after the US war with Iraq. Although American
foreign policy emphasizes its humanitarianism, the dignity of Iraqi
refugees was actually placed secondary to perceived threats to national“security” and economic concerns of American society. The neglectedsocial needs were often filled, not by the federal government, but by civilsociety actors or co-ethnic networks in the host community. She concludes
that the human costs for refugees and local communities arising from war
should be evaluated in a greater context than just that of warfare on theground.
Once more, I would like to express our gratitude to Katy Meigs for her
continuing assistance as copy editor for the journal. Regrettably, we only
have six essays in this issue—we especially miss presidential addresses
this year—but that does not diminish the quality of the essays in this issue
in any way. Most of the articles published in the Japanese Journal ofAmerican Studies, including those from back issues, are freely available on
the Internet at http://www.jaas.gr.jp. We invite responses and criticisms
from our readers.
Naochika Takao
Editor