The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 9 (1998)

Editor’s Introduction

The methods we use to transmit our ideas are undergoing sweepingchanges. Even in Japan the majority of intellectuals are now using the“QWERTY” keyboard to produce messages, essays, and articles in theJapanese language. In my high school days, I belonged to the school
newspaper club, in which my colleagues and I handwrote manuscripts
on rough quality paper with a pen or pencil. In the ﬁnal stages of editing the paper, we took special leave to be absent from class in order towork among the letterpress printers at a local newspaper factory. Typeset publication had a special meaning in those days, and we had asense of privilege as the editors of small newspapers. But as every
individual or group can send messages worldwide now through theInternet in ever more sophisticated ways, attention is being increasingly paid to the quality of the content of messages and observations.
“The Media and American Society” has been selected as the main
theme of this ninth issue of the Japanese Journal of American Studies.
A session on “Mass Media and American Politics” at the 1997 annualmeeting attracted a great deal of interest and two of the panelists contributed their papers. Reimei Okamura’s article, “US-Japan Relations
and the Media in the Information Age: Coverage of the American
Bases Issues in Okinawa,” deals with the touchy issue of the military
relationship of the two countries as it was abruptly highlighted after
the rape of a local schoolgirl by three marines in Okinawa in September 1995. The author suggests that the prompt coverage of the incident by local newspapers channeled the course of arguments there1

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EIICHI AKIMOTOafter in the media in both countries, leading to the redeﬁnition of theUS-Japan Security Treaty. “Public Journalism: Controversies over theMedia’s Role in 1990s America,” by Hiroshi Fujita approaches thetopic from several different perspectives. He pays attention to publicjournalism in the United States in the 1990s, within which the voicesof local readers and viewers have an active role to play in newspaper
making. The author ﬁnds considerable criticism of the experiment,
especially on the question of objectivity and editorial independence;
however, he foresees a potentially brighter future for public journalism
because of the malfunctioning of more traditional methods. In addition to the two panelists, Nobuo Kamioka contributed the essay,“Cyberpunk Revisited: William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the “Multimedia Revolution.” Investigating the futuristic ﬁction Neuromancer,
published in 1884 by the science ﬁction writer William Gibson, heshows how accurately this novel predicted the coming multimedia revolution. But Kamioka also points out that some of the discrepancies
between the present real world and Gibson’s image can be attributed
to Gibson’s lack of physical context. In “Doubleness: American Images of Japanese Men in Silent Spy Films,” Daisuke Miyao explores
the transformation of ambivalent images of Japanese men in theAmerican silent spy ﬁlms in the early twentieth century. The author
discusses the double image of Japanese men, an image at the sametime favorable, exotic and attractive, and threatening to the Westernworld.
There are three more articles submitted by the members of theJAAS. In “Josiah Collins III, A Successful Corn Planter: A Look at hisPlantation Management Techniques,” Tsutomu Numaoka delves into
the records of an antebellum Southern plantation in North Carolina,and ﬁnds a far more efﬁcient commercial corn production and morerational use of slave labor than historians had previously assumed. “ADemocracy at War: The American Campaign to Repeal Chinese Exclusion in 1943,” by Xiaohua Ma analyzes the driving forces toward
the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The author stresses the importance of the U.S. campaign against the Japanese “emancipation ofAsiatics” propaganda, and also China’s future role in the New World
Order designed by the State Department. In “Dine bi Olta or Schoolof the Navajos: Educational Experiments at Rough Rock Demonstration School, 1966–1970,” Yumiko Mizuno elucidates the development of Rough Rock Demonstration School in Arizona. The author

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acknowledges many innovations in curriculum as well as administration in the ﬁrst such project managed by native Americans, andexplains how the school inspired similar educational experiments inother communities.
The publication of the Journal is supported in part by a grant-in-aid
for the Publication of Scientiﬁc Research Results from the Japanese
Ministry of Education, for which we are deeply grateful. We welcome
active responses from our readers and hope they will be encouraged tosubmit their work to future issues, so that the publication will continue
to be an important medium for American Studies across both disciplinary and national boundaries.
Eiichi Akimoto
Editor