The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 24 (2013)

Editor’s Introduction“The real war will never get in the books,” said Walt Whitman. Yes, heis speaking about the Civil War, but it can probably be said of any otherwar. Of the same war, Herman Melville sang about the people who werebaffled and turned away by “mysteries dimly sealed,” while “musing onright and wrong” of the war. Again, this has been the experience of all who
have tried to penetrate the mysteries of wars ever since Paleolithic times.
This year’s issue of the Japanese Journal of American Studies combats
this old but ever-intriguing and always-perplexing conundrum.
As always, our front is multifold. The journal’s engagements with thequestion of war are fought in several theaters: political, historical, andliterary. Reading through the following essays, however, one will bestruck by literary authors’ (probably futile) attempts to reach out for war’s“mysteries dimly sealed,” while being impressed by historical and politicalstudies showing the difficulty of putting great human struggles neatly inthe books. Of course, the researchers’ methodologies may differ greatly;some endeavor to understand how certain authors envisioned war in theirworks, and some focus on how certain wartime organizations managed
their functions or how warring factions’ decisions affected the course of
the history, and still others show how personal lives were altered becauseof the hostilities between countries. But all suggest the manifold aspects ofwar as an activity of man as aggregate existence. War is quite beyond thecontrol of individuals in governments or organizations, and it demarcatesa psychologically totalitarian state where individual human beings becomeless like what they are in ordinary society. And such a state may defy
scientific description based on modern (individualist) rationality.
After all is said, war will never be fully described, nor will its mysteries
ever be uncovered by scientific research such as ours. But these descriptive
endeavors are necessary and worthwhile (I believe) in curbing the actionsof warring factions and in bringing the course of hostilities back within the12

Naochika Takaobounds of rationality. Now that Japan’s political leaders, conservative andradicals alike, are considering the possibility of amending the Constitution
so that it can create all-new armed forces to be ranked among the alreadycrowded military powers of the world, this issue of the JJAS will hopefully
be a soft small voice of reason.
The essays are arranged roughly in chronological order by their topics,
except for the two preceding pieces by former president of the JAAS,
Eisaku Kihira, (“The Politicization of the Slavery Issue in the Early
American Republic”) and by former president of the American Studies
Association, Priscilla Wald, (“Botanophobia: Fear of Plants in the AtomicAge”). The two essays are based on the Presidential Addresses given atJAAS’s 46th annual meeting held in Nagoya. Though uninformed of thisyear’s topic of the journal, the two presidents dealt with issues very muchat the heart of the question of war in American Studies.
These two presidential essays are followed first by Yukiko Oshima’s“Herman Melville’s ‘Pequot Trilogy’: The Pequot War in Moby-Dick,
Israel Potter, and Clarel,” in which Oshima discusses what she terms
Herman Melville’s “Pequot trilogy.” In these three major works, sheargues, Melville makes use of a Native American tribe, the Pequot, whowere declared extinct after the Puritan-Pequot War of 1636–37. She showsthat some aspects of the retributive violence are transposed in MobyDick and Clarel in the way that the “ghost” of the Pequot seems to find fit
agents in Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick and Nathan in Clarel. On the other
hand, according to Oshima, the third work, Israel Potter, demonstrates
Melville’s unconventional sympathy toward the Pequot.
Moving forward a few decades, we encounter the first organizedand professional “angels of war” in Yoshiya Makita’s “ProfessionalAngels at War: The United States Army Nursing Service and Changing
Ideals of Nursing at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” In this essay
Makita examines the changing ideals of female nursing in the UnitedStates through an analysis of the organization of the Army Nursing
Service at the turn of the twentieth century. In parallel with the domestic
institutionalization of nursing education since the late nineteenth century,
Makita argues, wartime emergencies provided the thrust to propel theprofessionalization of American women nurses. By focusing on the nursingservice during the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the Russo-JapaneseEditor’s Introduction

3War in 1904–5, he demonstrates in this essay that wartime activities ofAmerican women nurses facilitated a conceptual rearticulation of nursing
as a gendered “profession” in transnational milieus.
We then move to the various aspects of the two world wars. First,
Shusuke Takahara’s “America’s Withdrawal from Siberia and Japan-USRelations” examines America’s withdrawal from Siberia and its impact on
Japan-US relations during 1918–20. Because of the shifting international
environment, domestic pressure, and the rapid military developments inSiberia, President Woodrow Wilson decided to withdraw from Siberia.
Takahara shows how America’s sudden withdrawal forced the Japanese
government single-handedly to undertake the defense of Siberia andthe Trans-Siberian and the Chinese Eastern Railways by sending
reinforcements. In addition, the withdrawal damaged the Hara Cabinet’s
pro-American policy in Siberia and impeded its foreign policy decision
making vis-à-vis the Imperial Japanese Army. Lack of mutual trust
prompted unilateral actions of both countries in Siberia, which damaged
Japan-US relations.
Takeya Mizuno’s “A Disturbing and Ominous Voice from a Different
Shore: Japanese Radio Propaganda and its Impact on the US Government’s
Treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II” examines how aJapanese shortwave radio propaganda network, known as Radio Tokyo,
reported about mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WorldWar II. From the earliest phase of the war, Radio Tokyo saw the US federal
government’s discriminatory policy toward Japanese Americans as abonanza of propaganda opportunities. Mizuno’s findings demonstrate thatJapanese American mass incarceration was actually a policy that involved
dynamic global propaganda warfare.
Hiroo Nakajima’s “Beyond War: The Relationship between Takagi
Yasaka and Charles and Mary Beard” focuses on the personal friendshipbetween Takagi Yasaka, a founder of American Studies in Japan, and theprominent American historians Charles and Mary Beard. Nakajima argues
that Japanese-American cultural relations continued in spite of the PacificWar. For Takagi, the war between the two countries was an aberration. At
the same time, Charles Beard staunchly criticized President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who led the nation into the war with Japan, a country he had
visited twice with his wife Mary in the early 1920s. As the relationship

4Naochika Takao

between Takagi and the Beards resumed after the war, Wilsonianinternationalism regained momentum in Japan, which testifies to thecontinuity of Japanese-American cultural relations.
Takakazu Yamagishi’s “War, Veterans, and Americanism: The Political
Struggle over VA Health Care after World War II” demonstrates how theidea of Americanism impacted the development of Veterans Administration
health care. As an unprecedented number of soldiers began to come home
after World War II, the issue of VA health care caused a heated debate.
While veterans who fought the war to protect Americanism asked for theexpansion of VA health care as a compensation for their sacrifice, theiropponents criticized it as “socialized medicine,” which, they claimed, wasa threat to Americanism. By focusing on the political struggle over VA
health care after World War II, this article shows that both the founding
principles of the United States and international relations constrained whatveterans organizations could say and do. Yamagishi also makes theoreticalcontributions to the studies of health-care policy development.
Finally, turning back again to the literary front concerning World War
II, Takayoshi Ishiwari’s “Rainbow’s Light: Or, ‘Illuminations’ in Thomas
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow” shows how the image of “light” plays acrucial role in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. One can see whatmakes this novelistic encyclopedia of World War II “postmodern,” thatis, “post-World War II,” by looking at the ways in which Pynchon uses
the metaphor of light. On one hand, Pynchon’s paranoid vision of the war“breaks,” just as day or light does at the break of dawn. On the other, theentire novel might be read as an attempt to throw light on the author's
own stream of consciousness, or his vision of the war that demands tobe communicated in narrative form. The unique play of these two typesof “illumination” comes from Pynchon’s longing to see World War II forwhat it is.
To round up this year’s volume on war, we have an essay apiece on
the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Itsuki Kurashina’s “‘Let the MLF
Sink Out of Sight’: The Cold War and Alliance under the Johnson
Administration” examines the policy of the Johnson administration toward
the proposed Multilateral Force. MLF was designed to avoid nuclear
proliferation within the US-led alliance and to tighten its unity. Yet, theproposal failed to calm frictions among the allies. The eventual abortion

Editor’s Introduction

5of this project reveals an important aspect of the Cold War. It sat at thejuncture of superpower relations and intra-alliance relations. Its eventual
fate was largely influenced by their mixture.
And Takeshi Uesugi’s “Is Agent Orange a Poison?: Vietnamese Agent
Orange Litigation and the New Paradigm of Poison” focuses on the US
Federal court case, the Vietnamese Association for the Victims of AgentOrange (VAVA) v Dow Chemical et al. (2004). The case brought to thefore the paradox of adjudicating across a scientific paradigm shift, inwhich the concept of poison changed drastically. Uesugi argues that thecharacterization of Agent Orange—the chemical herbicides used by theUS military during the Vietnam War—as a poison was crucial for theplaintiffs’ international law claim but that it was not as self-evident before
the 1960s as it may seem now. Often mediated through the environment,and having a latency of up to decades, the toxic effects of the new typeof poison that emerged in the 1960s were discernible only through thestatistical patterns of diseases.
Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge Katy Meigs for her
continuing assistance as copy editor for the journal. Most of the articles
published in the Japanese Journal of American Studies, including thosefrom back issues, are now freely available on the Internet (http://www.jaas.
gr.jp). And this year I am happy to report that articles in the recent issues
will soon be searchable in EBSCO Publishing’s database services too. We
invite responses and criticisms from our readers and hope that the journal
will continue to be an important medium for American Studies.
Naochika TakaoEditor