The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 18 (2007)

Editor’s Introduction, 2007

In 2006, the Japanese Association for American Studies celebrated its 40thanniversary with a special one-day symposium held just prior to the association’s regular annual meeting. Seven invited speakers, a range of commentators, and the audience at large spent a productive day collectively engaging withthe concept of the “transpaciﬁc” and the various ways in which such a concept
might enable innovative reformulations of Americanist themes, narratives, andscholarly practices.
The main section of this special issue of The Japanese Journal of AmericanStudies is devoted to the proceedings of that symposium; it includes revised versions of the seven core papers and an introduction from the chair of the symposium and JAAS vice-president Natsuki Aruga.
In addition to the symposium proceedings, this issue of the journal also
includes two presidential addresses delivered at the 2006 annual meeting, Karen
Halttunen’s “Transnationalism and American Studies in Place,” and Daizaburo
Yui’s “Searching for Inter-Civilizational Dialogue,” as well as three papers contributed to the journal by members of the JAAS, and brief abstracts of Englishlanguage works published by the association’s members in the previous year.
The three contributed papers, fortuitously, all develop in their substantive
analysis one or more of the issues raised at the anniversary symposium. In“Estranged Sisterhood: The Wartime Trans-Paciﬁc Dialogue of the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, 1931–1945,” Manako Ogawa responds to theeurocentrism of previous studies of women’s transnational activities with afocus on transpaciﬁc dialogue and the national chapters of the World’s WCTU
in the US, Japan, and China. Toru Umezaki takes up a different but equallytransnational geography in his paper “Breaking Through the Cane-Curtain: TheCuban Revolution and the Emergence of New York’s Radical Youth, 1961–1965,” detailing the ways in which student members of the Progressive Labor
Movement became radicalized in the course of visits to Cuba, turning toward aview of US foreign policy attuned to the connection of racism with imperialism.
Finally, in his study “Made in Kentucky: The Meanings of ‘Local’ Food
Products in Kentucky’s Farmers’ Markets,” Taro Futamura undertakes the1

2HONESdestabilization of yet another apparently natural spatial category, arguing thatthe marketing use of the term “local” serves to hide more than it reveals about
the sites of food production and the politics of consumer-producer relations.
In the past, the JJAS has devoted itself primarily to the publication of Englishlanguage work submitted by JAAS members. In that sense, the emphasis in thisspecial issue on contributions from non-members represents something of abreak with tradition. It might even seem, as a result, that this issue of the journal
has taken up the symposium’s emphasis on the transnational in a most practicalfashion, with a shift away from its traditional focus on work produced by members of the national association and towards a more inclusive internationalism.
Such an interpretation, however, would depend upon a quite limited understanding of the “national” and the “international.” In practice, as much of thesymposium discussion suggested, and as many of the papers presented in thisissue of the journal demonstrate, the binary construction underpinning the ideathat the national and the international stand in mutually-deﬁning opposition isvery much open to question.
The modiﬁer “Japanese” in the journal’s title, for example, cannot be taken
in any simple way to indicate that the journal is a “national” rather than an “international” publication. For while the term might seem at ﬁrst to refer most naturally to the predominant (but nonetheless not deﬁning) characteristics of themembership of the JAAS—in terms of citizenship, for example, ethnicity, language(s) of choice, or place of birth—it might also be taken to refer to a mappingof the international scholarly world in which the Japanese academy was strategically located at the center, as origin, destination, and point of reference. And
it might also be understood to refer much more simply to the fact that the journal is edited by JAAS members and produced in Japan, supported in part by agrant-in-aid for the Publication of Scientiﬁc Research Results from the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science.
The modiﬁer “international” in the title of the symposium is equally complex
in its implications, not least because the very performance of the inter-nationalin this case simultaneously functions to reinscribe the signiﬁcance of its constituent national categories: the symposium seemed so clearly “international”
precisely because it brought together for a one-day event an ingathering ofscholars from half-a-dozen locations outside Japan. International inclusivenesswas thereby indicated by the range in afﬁliations of its speakers, even though
the audience was made up largely of Japan-based scholars, it was sponsored bya national association, and it took place in a single location. The JJAS in its moreusual form, on the other hand, performs its internationalism not so much throughingathering as through outreach, aiming to make work produced by Japan-basedscholars more widely and evenly accessible within the worldwide American
studies community. Now freely accessible to members and non-members alikeon the internet, the journal thereby articulates its inclusiveness not in terms ofEDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

3authorship but in terms of audience. In this sense, the JJAS, like the symposium,
is both the product of a national association and yet international in its scopeand purpose.

SHEILA HONES
Editor

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 300 words) bymid-January. We are unable to accept the manuscript without
this procedure.
3. The ﬁnal manuscript (maximum 7000 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