The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 19 (2008)

Editor’s Introduction, 2008

After having dedicated our eighteenth volume of the Japanese Journal ofAmerican Studies to the proceedings of the international symposium to celebrate
the 40th anniversary of the Japanese Association for American Studies, volume
nineteen now returns to our regular format with a special theme as well as general
topics from the members. We also include in this issue the address delivered by
the ASA president at the 2007 JAAS annual meeting at Rikkyo University.
This issue takes up “The City” as the special theme. From the heavenly
Jerusalem, “the City of God,” in the Judeo-Christian tradition to the golden city
in Greek and Roman myths, the city in its conceptual aspect holds a celestial
dimension reflecting an ideal dwelling place in eternity, as well as a terrestrial
one as the center for economic and social activities promising affluence and abetter life. With their hope of reaching “great cities and towns” in the province of“Catayo” [Cathay], the fifteenth-century European explorers crossed the Atlanticand encountered an unknown continent and its people; religious visionaries
ventured into the “wilderness” to build a typological “City upon a Hill” in theNew World Canaan. From the colonial period when Europeans eagerly searched
for the land of gold and gospel, America has provided the sites both for real aswell as for imagined heavenly cities. Since then “the City” in America has been
conceptualized and idealized as well as invented and exploited by dreamers,
seekers, and others who have crossed the borders from many parts of the world
with their own visions, dreams, and desires. Such historical backgrounds haveendowed the cities in America with multi-layered meanings. The contributors inthis volume elaborate these meanings through their literary, cultural, political,and geographical analysis.
The first article in this issue, “Terror, Aesthetics, and the Humanities in thePublic Sphere” was delivered as a presidential address by Emory Elliott from theAmerican Studies Association (USA). In this essay, Elliott introduces us to thedystopian post-9/11 New York City that Don DeLillo depicts in his Cosmopolis(2003). Elliott argues that DeLillo as well as Phillip Roth in their post-9/11
novels employ an “aesthetics of astonishment to prompt readers to examine therealities of their society and the failures of their leaders,” just as Melville and1

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Twain attempted social criticism in their novels in nineteenth-century America.
Elucidating jeremiads from the past and from contemporary American writers,
Elliott emphasizes the power of letters and reminds us of the significant roles
which scholars in the humanities can play in a time of crisis such as the UnitedStates is now facing.
The next ten articles are devoted to the special theme of the current issue;
seven of them deal with literature. The first two articles analyze two major novels
by Nathaniel Hawthorne in relation to the nineteenth-century urban reformmovements. Both articles refer to efforts to create an idealistic public space andtheir failure. In “Sex and the City: The Reconstruction of Middle-Class Urban
Consciousness in The Scarlet Letter,” Naochika Takao focuses on the two“displacements” in the preface to Hawthorne’s novel and argues that suchdisplacements intrinsically relate to a nascent urban, middle-class consciousness
emerging out of one of the first cityscapes in the United States. He specificallyanalyzes how Hawthorne positions the three main characters in the public sphereof Puritan Boston, and shows how the writer’s experience of being dismissedfrom public office connects to the double displacements to create a novelistic
criticism of antebellum urbanity.
In “Reading The House of the Seven Gables in the Context of the NineteenthCentury Urban Burial Reform Movement,” Shitsuyo Masui contextualizes
Hawthorne’s novel in the burial reform movement in the Northern cities during
rapid population growth. Comparing articles concerning death and burial
practices in the period with the Seven Gables, she maintains that the prevalent
domestic ideology is at work in these texts to form citizens into a national bodyas an extended family through a healthy feeling of sympathy. She argues thatHawthorne resists the powerful rhetoric of domesticity by creating a bizarre
domestic space in which underworld elements destabilize the everyday world of
the living and reveals the psychological thresholds mid-nineteenth-century
individuals had to cross as they tried to demarcate supernatural elements toadjust to modern rationality.
The next two articles deal with two late-nineteenth century cosmopolitanwriters, Henry James and Constance Fenimore Woolson, who had several themesin common. In “From City of Culture to City of Consumption: Boston in Henry
James’s The Bostonians,” Yuko Nakagawa argues that James chose Boston as thesetting for his “very American tale” to depict how it had changed from a city ofculture marked by the New England mindset to a city of consumer culture, vulgarand immoral. Nakagawa asserts that such a transition is embodied in the city’s
landscape and in the two Bostonians: Olive Chancellor, one of the Boston elites
and a feminist, who resists but eventually assimilates to the culture ofconsumption, and Verena Tarrant, a talented young speaker and one of James’sAmerican Girls, who easily becomes a model consumer both in Boston and in
New York but ends up in a marriage with no bright prospects as a result of her

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3insensitivity to humanity. Nakagawa reads the novel as James’s critical commenton the transition Boston went through. It can also be said that to James, with his
cosmopolitan background, Boston was “provincial” just as America itself was.
Befriended by James in their Florentine expatriate circle, Woolson presents
American Girls in her texts differently from the way James does. YukoMatsukawa, in “Defining the American Flâneuse: Constance Fenimore Woolsonand ‘A Florentine Experiment,’” argues that the representation of the flâneuse(the female counterpart to the urban stroller, the flâneur) in Woolson’s writingreconfigures our understanding of not only modernity but the construction offemale subjectivity. Focusing on Woolson’s short story, Matsukawa discusses
how Florentine urban spaces and their subjection to the expatriate female gazeprovide Woolson and her flâneuse protagonist with the means of addressing theiridentities as American upper-middle-class women and of reinventing themselvesin Florence, a foreign city that itself symbolizes artistic rebirth.
The next two articles deal with writers from the Midwest: Theodore Dreiser
and Gwendolyn Brooks. In “Dreiser and the Wonder and Mystery and Terror ofthe City,” Kiyohiko Murayama shows that Theodore Dreiser, the so-called
founder of the city novel, was not a mere recorder of facts. Murayama argues thatDreiser constructively borrowed literary precedents, such as the formulaic
seduction story of the sentimental novel, the novel portraying a young artist
afflicted with alienation in the city, and the literature of slumming that wasconducive to the aesthetics of the urban sublime which, remodeled from thepastoral tradition, served to foster proletarian literature. In “Space, Class, City:
Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha,” Julia Leyda applies the concept of the“imagined geography” in her reading of the novel. Leyda argues that
representations of the characters’ imaginative geographies express their spatialand classed identities in relation to the body. She proposes a way of reading thatconsiders both kinds of geographies produced within the novel’s pages: throughcharacters’ spatial imaginaries, as well as those that can be produced by thereaders’ engagements with the literary text.
The eighth article deals with the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winningmusical of 1996, Rent, which celebrates the lives of artists living in the East
Village, New York, in the 1990s, in the midst of problems that arise withgentrification and AIDS. Naomi Tonooka, in “Art and Urban Space: Rent, theEast Village, and the Construction of Meaning,” argues that in its unprecedented
commercial success in spite of its emphasis on the artist’s aesthetic autonomy,
the musical epitomizes art’s ambiguous relationships to processes ofcommoditization. Yet, Tonooka asserts, this musical also contains an internal
critique of such relationships, and by designating the gaps between the artist’s
vision of the world and the vaster, unrepresentable realities, it mediates thecognitive map of the East Village and the city, and ultimately enables theindividual subject to map and reconfigure her or his relationship to social space.

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Two papers offering political perspectives on the theme of “the City” follow
the literary analysis. In “The American Welfare State and the City: The Politics
of the Social Welfare Policy in New York City under the Lindsay Administration,”
Takayuki Nishiyama notes an irony afflicting the American welfare state: stateand local governments that have structural difficulty in adopting redistributive
policy have the responsibility to implement the Aid to Families with DependentChildren (AFDC) program. This article explores the nature of the American
welfare state by examining the politics of social policy in New York City under
the Lindsay Administration (1966–1973), which started an ambitious campaign
to sign people up for welfare. The conclusions point to the importance of looking
at the politics of social policy at the local level to understand the nature of theAmerican welfare state.
In “City-County Separation and Consolidation in the United States: TheImpact on Urban Growth,” Masaharu Yasuoka examines the advantages anddisadvantages of city-county consolidation, in which some eleven US cities since2006 have joined together with their neighboring counties to form a single
government. By comparing consolidated and independent cities, Yasuoka
outlines the complicated arguments for and against consolidation: for example,
cities are more likely to experience fiscal stress because of their responsibility forroad construction and maintenance. But Yasuoka concludes from the mixed
results of the comparison that city type alone does not satisfactorily explain thevariations in socioeconomic conditions among US cities. His conclusion calls for
future researchers to explore how to integrate the city types as an intervening
variable into the analytical models for urban study.
The last of the papers on the special theme is from the discipline of historical
geography. In “Origins of Cities and Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century
Southern California: Regional Changes in the Context of Three EconomicCultural Regions of the Americas,” Noritaka Yagasaki gives a geographic
interpretation of the urban development of the Americas as a whole and thenature of southern Californian cities. Focusing on the origin of cities andurbanization in southern California in the nineteenth century, he maps thehistoric-geographic process of urbanization and examines the driving force
behind the establishment of cities. Yagasaki divides the urbanization of southern
California into four periods: the Spanish-Mexican period, the emergence ofAmerican cities in the 1850s and 1860s, the steady increase of planned cities in
the 1870s to mid-1880s, and the boom of the late 1880s and rapid urbandevelopment. Rather than examining individual cities, he attempts to elucidate
the context of regional changes in order to verify that southern Californian cities
in the nineteenth century reflected the overall economic and cultural transitions
taking place in the Americas.
The last two papers, by Wakako Araki and Ichiro Miyata, focus on the SouthEDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

5and the issues of gender, class, and race. In “Gender, Race, and the Idea ofSeparate Spheres: Neo-Abolitionist Work in South Carolina Sea Islands,”
Wakako Araki contends that the idea of separate spheres as a gendered, raced andclassed concept is key to understanding the course of neo-abolitionist aid andeducational work for freed people in the post-emancipation South. Araki argues
that freedwomen were not subsumed under Barbara Welter’s notion of true
womanhood and examines how white women struggled with the discourse of theseparate spheres as well. Her study demonstrates that the construct of separate
spheres was more contested in the 1860s than previous studies have shown.
In “Manufacturing Segregation: The Birth and Death of Underground Atlanta,1969–1981,” Ichiro Miyata demonstrates that Underground Atlanta, a tourist
attraction, was destined to fail because of its futile attempt to create a white
middle-class space in downtown Atlanta, where the effects of post-war
deindustrialization, including unemployment, homelessness, and the presence ofpoor racial/ethnic minorities, were becoming apparent. The developers andpoliticians who endeavored to build the tourist enclave claimed that Underground
Atlanta was a family-oriented, “everybody’s” entertainment district but it only
welcomed middle-class white consumers. Underground Atlanta built fences andgates around its property when the visibility of the homeless population, mostly
black, increased, which ironically represented Underground’s failure to keep
their “healthy” downtown for middle-class people; they eventually closed theirgates for good in 1981.
The publication of this volume is supported in part by a grant-in-aid for thePublication of Science Research Results from the Japan Society for thePromotion of Science, for which we are deeply grateful. All the articles publishedin the JJAS are accessible on the JAAS website (http://www.jaas.gr.jp/). We
welcome responses and criticisms from our readers and hope that the journal willserve as an important medium for American Studies across cities and countries,
beyond disciplinary as well as geographical boundaries.

SHITSUYO MASUIEditor6MASUIFor 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) by
mid-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 for papers” announcement with exact deadlines and the special
theme for the forthcoming issue.
5. The JAAS will accept inquiries through email:office@jaas.gr.jp