The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 21 (2010)

Editor’s Introduction

Since the early encounter between the English and Native people, America,
as “the land of plenty,” has attracted many to its shores. Immediately after his
landing in April 1584, the English explorer Arthur Barlowe reported to Walter
Raleigh on the fertility of the New World soil: “The earth bringeth foorth allthings in aboundance, as in the ﬁrst creation, without toile or labour.” In the following year, John White, an English colonist and artist, emphasized food whenillustrating in watercolor paintings what he saw during his voyage to Virginia.
Among about forty natural product images that still survive today, more than
one third are of plants or animals considered to be edible by the English in histime. These reports attracted early settlers to Virginia and New England to establish colonies for habitation, which soon became the sites of competition for survival among people in pursuit of food for their families. The theme of food is
closely related to the myth of America as a New Eden. In choosing food as themain theme of this volume, we hope to open up a new perspective in the studyof American society in terms of its material as well as literary culture.
The process of cultural hybridization and creolization started with actual
material exchanges among the people involved and this pattern has persisted
throughout American history. Although the English and Europeans soon occupied “the land of plenty,” the Native inhabitants also participated in the processof cultural hybridization. In the early image of the New World, American
Indians were subjects to be observed by the colonists and Europeans. At thesame time, the cultural products and artifacts produced by American Indians
were also introduced in the early paintings by Europeans or carried to Europe
to be presented in court, in special exhibitions and in printed books.
The ﬁrst article in this volume examines the complexities of the historicalcultural hybridization by introducing Mary Sully, an anonymous Dakota Siouxartist active in the 1930s. Philip Deloria’s article is based on a Presidential
Address delivered at the 2009 JAAS annual meeting in Tsuda College. Deloria,
former president of the American Studies Association, presents Sully’s works
as an example of aesthetic comments on Depression-era culture and the intellectual movements in psychology and anthropology. He argues that ﬁgures such1

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as Sully open up the chronology and the disciplinary sensibility of AmericanStudies as it is commonly understood in a United States context, laying a different kind of intellectual groundwork for international partnerships and practices within the ﬁeld.
The following ten articles are devoted to the special theme of this issue: food.
The ﬁrst four articles approach the theme from literary perspectives. Makiko
Wakabayashi approaches the work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman who often usedfood as a literary motif. Her analysis of the novelist’s dietary discourse shows
how food serves for Freeman as a discursive tool to overcome the cult of domesticity. Wakabayashi demonstrates that Freeman not only unmasks how the cultof domesticity imposes a repressive approach to food but also gives birth to gastrocentric heroines who cross the boundary drawn by a domestic ideology into
a new territory of women’s experience. Freeman’s writings, she argues, suggest the possibility that women’s use of literally realism was, in a certain sense,
the revolt of female appetite against the sentimental tradition of domesticity.
Eijun Senaha employs a new historicist approach to a work by Hemingway.
Senaha argues that Hemingway describes the rising food industry and the spreadof “boy culture” in “Big Two-Hearted River,” in which protagonist Nick Adams
experiences conﬂict over masculinity. The article explores both food and boy
culture since the end of the eighteenth century in order to demonstrate how theirinﬂuence ran counter to national expectations for strong men during wartime.
It concludes that the text, though it beautifully presents the boy’s ﬁshing trip,
is in actuality a modernist representation of masculine negotiation that fails tocreate a path toward ideal manhood.
Masahiko Abe writes about another twentieth-century American writer,
Bernard Malamud who is known for his strict daily routine, which is probably
linked with his practice as a novelist. More importantly, however, such selfregulation reﬂects, Abe argues, the novelist’s concern about his physical condition. For Malamud, who once suffered from stomach ulcer and whose family
members had histories of illness, health control was a great issue and eating naturally formed part of his concern. Abe maintains that examination of the scenes
in the story that focuses on food and eating reveal how through food-related
descriptions Malamud approaches something abstract and spiritual, such as personal discipline and even ethics.
The last article from the literary perspective is Kiyomi Sasame’s exploration ofMargaret Atwood’s attitude to food and eating in her dystopian novels, The
Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. Sasame argues that food in these novels
reveals not only the character of the protagonists but also the society in which they
are struggling for survival. Sasame maintains that in the former work, food functions both as a metaphor for the overt power of the oppressors and the subversive
power of the oppressed. The latter work studies food in an age of genetic engineering and addresses the question, “How will we eat in the twenty-ﬁrst century?”EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

3The next three articles approach the theme of food from historical perspectives and investigate how the nineteenth-century American food culture inﬂuenced both domestic and international communities. Nanami Suzuki ﬁnds thatthe food culture of the United States underwent great changes from the 1820s
to the 1890s. At the same time, in the antebellum period, a popular health movement arose that questioned the food culture that had become so rich and sodiverse. Arising in opposition to standard medicine, it became a movement ofhealth reform that proposed new methods of healing and care that focused especially on diet. The questions it posed about health, well-being, and way of life
were aimed at reforming the “bodies and souls” of Americans. Suzuki showsthat fully worked-out recipes served to unify the followers of those movements,
who believed that attaining good health would allow them to be key agents ina changing American society.
Takahiro Ueyama also focuses on the nineteenth-century American-borntherapeutic diet movement and examines its impact in the context of Americanization across the Atlantic. Ueyama argues that in late Victorian London,
the proliferation of patent medicines, health-related foods, and therapeutic dietsheralded a new cultural phenomenon. People in the period began to seek these
medical products and therapeutic commodities to acquire a longer, fuller, andrejuvenated life. In this new form of buying health, Ueyama ﬁnds the shadow
of modern market-mechanism, which was often abhorred as “Americanization” — an intrusion of a particularly American brand of commercialism in theform of heavy advertising, market-oriented entrepreneurship, and therapeuticideology. Ueyama notes that London was one of the ﬁrst cities to experience
the onslaught of hyper-commercialized advertising, the product of rough-andtumble business competition. He argues that the permeation of market capitalism into the very private sphere of peoples’ health signiﬁes a distinct departurefrom Britons’ traditional way of life in an age of incipient globalization.
Izumi Ishii takes us back to the domestic American scene, focusing on theCherokee Indians, who, under the guidance of United States agents and missionaries, adopted various aspects of the Anglo-American lifestyle and Christianity in the early nineteenth-century Southeast. She examines the ways inwhich the federal government and missionaries introduced European-styleagriculture into Indian societies. Many Cherokees, Ishii argues, had adopted
European agricultural practices selectively and fused them with traditionalfarming techniques. The production of food thus mirrored the broader processof culture change in which Cherokees and other Indians adopted what was useful but maintained much of their traditional way of life. Ishii’s assessment isthat by continuing traditional foodways — that is, with what they ate — Nativepeoples retained an important aspect of their cultures and their very identity asIndians.

4MASUIThe focus of the next article involves contemporary policymaking efforts toregulate the ﬁshing industry to supply seafood for consumption while ensuring
protection and conservation of natural marine resources. Takanori Ohashi analyzes U.S. efforts toward a better rights-based ﬁsheries management to ensurea sustainable supply of seafood. Ohashi traces the shift from a traditional regimeof “command and control” to one that allows the expansion of individual ﬁshing quota (IFQ) programs and their evolution into limited access privilege programs (LAPP) to curb overﬁshing. Ohashi argues that conventional management schemes, combined with LAPP, can help rebuild sustainable ﬁsh stocks
and ensure an increased supply of seafood to U.S. consumers.
The last two articles submitted by the JAAS members in the U.S. and inGermany respectively attest to the trend of increasing globalization among JJAS
contributors in recent years. Both authors employ Cultural Studies approaches
to the theme of food and examine intricate relations between food and culture
in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity. Ai Hisano illuminates the romanticizing of homemade foods in the early twentieth-century U.S. by focusing on“Betty Crocker,” created by General Mills as a marketing ﬁgure in 1921. Hisanoargues that Betty Crocker’s cooking advice and its relation to social conditions
reﬂect gender norms and “ideal womanhood.” The social construction of a“home cooking and love” discourse was closely associated with dynamicchanges in American society in the early twentieth century, namely the home
economics movement, the culture of consumption, and the changes in family
structures and relations. By examining how Betty Crocker materialized thesanctiﬁcation of home cooking, Hisano argues that home cooking took on a gendered ideology.
In the last article of this volume, Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt focuses on the inﬂuence of Japanese food culture in general and sushi in particular on American
food culture in a transnational context. Laemmerhirt demonstrates how Japanand the United States ﬁrst used food as a cultural marker by differentiating themselves in terms of the food they consumed, thereby equalizing strange food withstrange people and barbaric eating habits with uncivilized consumers. However,this conﬂation of uncivilized people with strange food has shifted over thecourse of history. Laemmerhirt argues that what has once been considered to
be a barbaric eating habit, such as eating raw ﬁsh, has become part of American
haute cuisine, and sushi can now be found in every American supermarket. Thecase of sushi is an example of how an originally Japanese culinary product wasadopted and adapted by the American foodscape. Her article closely examines
the process of hybridization of cultures demonstrated in diet practices over thecenturies through trans-Paciﬁc exchanges.
The publication of the current issue of the JJAS is supported in part by a grantin-aid for the Publication of Science Research Results from the Japan Societyfor the Promotion of Science. We are deeply grateful for the Society’s support

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5for our journal, which continues to make efforts to promote international dialogue in the ﬁeld of American Studies. We also want to express our deep appreciation to Ms. Katy Meigs, our copy-editor, who has worked closely with all
the writers of this volume. Most articles published in the JJAS are accessible on
the JAAS website (http://www.jaas.gr.jp/). We welcome responses as well as
criticisms from our readers and hope that the journal will serve as a medium forAmerican Studies beyond disciplinary as well as geographical boundaries.

SHITSUYO MASUI
Editor

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)
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.
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:ofﬁce@jaas.gr.jp