The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

English-Language Works by JAAS Members
2000
The following citations and abstracts introduce recent publications and dissertations, written in English by the members of the Japanese Association for
American Studies, on topics related to American Studies. The works are listed in the order of articles in journals, articles in books, books, and dissertations.

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS
Ando, Chiharu. “ ‘Mesa Culled JaJa Binkss’: Black English in Star Wars:
Episode I The Phantom Menace.” Bulletin of the Basic Science (Aichi Medical University) 27 (2000): 23–36.
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was released in 1999. Notwithstanding its celebrity,
this ﬁlm was also somewhat controversial. The controversy arose over the issue of the
racial discrimination. A comic-relief character, Jar Jar Binks became the centerpieceof the contention. This article analyzes the way Jar Jar speaks in order to trace theBlack English inﬂuences on his character.

Fujioka, Mayumi. “Japanese Graduate Students’ Development of Academic
Writing Ability in English: Their Cross-Cultural Educational Experiences inJapan and the U.S.” Hiroshima Journal of International Studies (Faculty ofInternational Studies, Hiroshima City University) 6 (2000): 175–193.
This article explores how Japanese students in American graduate schools learn toadapt to a new culture through their own reﬂections on their linguistic and cultural
background and analyses and observations of academic practice in the native and thetarget cultures. Employing a case-study approach, the study describes seven students’processes of learning to write research papers in English.

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Hones, Sheila. “ ‘Asia-Paciﬁc Manifestations.” The University of Tokyo Journal of American Studies 5 (2000): 9–21.
This study experiments with the use of textual criticism in popular geopolitics. It reads
a variety of academic and popular texts as boundary-drawing performances participating in the construction of both expert and non-expert interpretations of the deﬁnition
and the signiﬁcance of the “Asia Paciﬁc.”

Igawa, Masago. “The Outrage of Young Satan: Mark Twain’s Views on theImperial Age.” Proceedings of the Kyoto American Studies Summer Seminar,
July 29-July 31, 1999 (Center for American Studies, Ritsumeikan University,
Kyoto), (March 2000): 175–82.
In “The Chronicle of Young Satan” Mark Twain expresses his bitter feelings against
the imperialistic trend at the end of the nineteenth century. However, this paper
demonstrates that, despite Satan’s cynical and unfeeling diatribes, the story has afﬁrmative elements as well. I try to show the literary power of Twain’s “sense of hope,”
rather than his so-called pessimism.

Kamisada, Shuichi. “The Crisis of Identity and the Logic of Assimilation:
The Ideological Hegemony of Locke and Hegel in America.” Wayo Studies
Journal (Wayo Women’s University) 40 (2000): 35–51.
This essay tries to outline a historical overview of successive American efforts toward
self-deﬁnition, with particular attention to the two most powerful strands of modern
thought constitutive of the American ideological consensus, Lockean liberal individualism and Hegelian dialectic historicism.

Katagiri, Yasuhiro. “Blurring the ‘Color-Line’?: Reﬂections on Interracialand Multiracial America.” 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal ofNorth American Studies (an electronic journal edited and published by the
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham,
United Kingdom)6 (2000).
http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/49thparallel/backissues/issue6/katagiri.htm.
Prompted by a controversy over interracial relations, which surfaced in the 2000 presidential election, the author probes the impact of the growing number of interracial
couples and their offspring on American society, as well as the issues revolving
around the racial designations of the 2000 census.

Koike, Misako. “American Studies and the Liberation of a Japanese Woman:
A Personal Narrative.” American Studies International 38: 3 (October 2000):
72–78.
My article was published in a special Women’s Studies issue of ASI, under theconnecting title: “Intersections: Global Feminisms, American Studies.” Feminist
American Studies scholars from Portugal, Korea, Poland, Indonesia, the U.S.A., andJapan participated in the project. I contributed a personal narrative of my efforts tocombine feminism and American Studies in Japan.

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Koike, Misako. “Challenges and Hopes of American Theatre in the Twentyﬁrst Century.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 11 (2000): 91–108.
This paper foresees major challenges for American theatre in the 21st century, comingfrom high technology and the corporate system of production. It then explores somesigns of hope in the plays of Anna Deavere Smith and Paula Vogel, who investigate
current problems of American society and reexamine the function of theatre through a
combination of the power of language and human elements.

Kurihara, Tamiko. “A Comparative Study of Economic Activities of Sogo
Shosha in the United States and Canada in the early 1990s.” Geographical
Review of Japan, Ser. B, 73: 2 (2000): 191–206.
The examination of the different trading and investment patterns of sogo shosha in the
United States and Canada reveals that they have recognized the United States andCanada as two distinct markets. It also shows that the economic environments of thehost and home countries have affected the economic activities of sogo shosha in North
America.

Ma, Xiaohua. “The Sino American Alliance during World War II and theLifting of the Chinese Exclusion Acts.” American Studies International 38(2000): 39–61.
This paper examines how the United States transformed its China policy to promote
China as an “equal state” in international relations during World War II. In particular,
it focuses on the repeal of racially discriminatory legislation against the Chinese in1943. By examining the process of repeal, we can see that the abolition of the discriminatory laws against the Chinese not only marked a historic turning point in America’s
China policy in wartime, but also had a great impact on the transformation ofAmerica’s East Asian policy in the postwar period.

Maekawa, Reiko. “Josephine Herbst’s ‘Proletarian’ Trilogy—Recreating the
Past and Self.” Review of English Literature (English Department, Faculty ofIntegrated Human Studies, Kyoto University) 72 (2000): 29–59.
This paper examines Josephine Herbst’s trilogy, Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The
Executioner Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939). The author suggests that Herbst’s
emphasis on memory, the past, and the family made her unique among “proletarian”
novelists of the Thirties who wrote within the general ambience of Marxism.

Maekawa, Reiko. “Philanthropy and Politics at the Crossroads: John D.
Rockefeller 3rd’s Japanese Experience.” The Integrated Human Studies (Faculty of Integrated Human Studies, Kyoto University) 7 (2000): 67–82.
This paper focuses on the philanthropic activities of John D. Rockefeller III in postwar
Japan. Through a close look at his conﬁdential reports and memoranda, the author
explores the psychological and political motives of those placed at the crossroads ofpolitics and philanthropy.

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Matsuoka, Hiroshi. “Cold War Perspectives on U.S. Commitment in Vietnam.” Journal of American Studies 11 (2000): 49–69.
The essence of America’s Cold War diplomacy was articulated in decisions made in
1954 and 1961 by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy respectively to defend South
Vietnam. The reasons behind these decisions were rivalries with the Russian andChinese Communists, aspiration for regional security and integration in Southeast
Asia, and the necessity of building a strong and viable democracy in South Vietnam.

Matsushita, Hiroshi. “The First Integrated Wave of Regionalism and Democratization in the Americas: A Comparison of NAFTA and MERCOSUR.”
The Japanese Journal of American Studies 11 (2000): 25–48.
This article analyzes the democratizing effects of economic integration, taking
NAFTA as an example of free trade agreement and MERCOSUR as an example ofcustoms union. One tentative conclusion is that though the latter is much the more
integrated, until now the former has served more effectively to advance Mexico’s
democracy.

Mizuno, Takeya. “Self-Censorship by Coercion: The Federal Government
and the California Japanese-Language Newspapers from Pearl Harbor to Internment.” American Journalism 17 (Summer 2000): 31–57.
During the period between Pearl Harbor to the mass internment of JapaneseAmericans in mid-1942, the federal government enforced a unique press control policy on Japanese-language newspapers. The federal government at ﬁrst took suppressive
measures. After the initial surge of coercions, however, the government used lesscoercive methods. This combination of both coercive and less coercive controls enabled the government to elicit self-censorship without resorting to formal censorship.

Murata, Katsuyuki. “Re-examining the Literature on Race, Ethnicity, Nativism, and Citizenship: A Theoretical Prelude to Studies on Undocumented
Immigrant History.” University of Tokyo Journal of American Studies 5(2000): 179–201.
Since the 1970s the debate on undocumented immigration has been a battleground on
which a number of social issues have converged. This theoretical piece is a preliminary work for understanding the ways in which race, ethnicity, nativism and citizenship have been interconnected in the formation of the “undocumented immigration
problem.”Nakashima, Tomoko. “The Vogue for Things Japanese in the American
Aesthetic Movement.” The Komaba Journal of Area Studies (The Universityof Tokyo) 4 (2000): 157–176.
During the 1870s and the 80s, at the height of the Aesthetic Movement, America’s
preoccupation with things Japanese reached its peak. This paper argues that the socalled “Japan craze” was not simply a one-way movement taking place in America. It
was globally produced, but differently perceived and taken advantage of in different
contexts, both in America and Japan.

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Nitta, Keiko. “Strategic Self-Commodiﬁcation As Resistance: The Complexity of Media-Transmitted Cultural Attitudes.” Popular Culture Review(Far West American and Popular Culture Associations) 11:2 (2000): 39–51.
This essay investigates how the mass mediation of rap music became the source of
momentum for the emergence of a paradoxical mode of resistance to the dominantculture: strategic self-commodiﬁcation. This problem is connected to the electronically mediated reproduction—mainly through tele-visual and digital sound recording systems—of urban (originally black youth) culture and the ﬁgures of rap musicians themselves. In order to approach this issue, I ﬁrst look at the historical context in which rap
has acquired its cultural visibility, in terms of the tension between rapper’s politics ofself-expression and the racial order that conditions the institutional evaluation of thisgenre. Next, I analyze several arguments on the consequence of rap’s commercial success that conditioned the dominant style of Gangsta Rap.

Nozaki, Kyoko, D. Phan and P. Grant. “Daniel Okimoto: A Nisei Life.”
Kyoto Journal 45 (2000): 72–78.
Daniel Okimoto’s life began in the Japanese American Internment camps during
World War II and matured in the minority movements in the 1960s. His ambivalent
reﬂections on his Japanese American identity have made his book, American in Disguise: A Nisei Search for Identity (1971), controversial within Asian American studies. However it remains a valuable piece in relation to trace the early consciousness ofAsian Americans.

Ochiai, Akiko. “African American Politicization in South Carolina during theReconstruction.” Area Studies (Masters Program in Area Studies, Universityof Tsukuba) 18 (2000): 51–69.
This paper elucidates African American politicization during the Reconstruction(1865–1876) with an emphasis on its close relationship to freed people’s agrarian pursuit of landownership. It speciﬁcally examines South Carolina as an example of state
politics and its lowcountry area as a paradigm of local politics.

Ogata, Fusako. “Approval of the Contraceptive Pill in Japan: Comparative
Reﬂections on Reproductive Rights in Japan and the U.S.” Tezukayama University Bulletin of Humanities (Tezukayama University) 2 (2000): 29–48.
The paper deals with the long-awaited approval in June 1999 of the low-dose contraceptive pill in Japan. It also puts the two aspects of reproductive rights, approval of thepill and the status quo of abortion in Japan into the context of a comparative analysis
with the situation in the United States, especially with regard to contemporary abortion debates.

Saito, Noboru. “Thoreau and a Japanese Poet.” The Thoreau Society Bulletin(The Thoreau Society) 233 (2000): 1–3.

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When we consider H. D. Thoreau’s inﬂuence on Japanese literature, we cannot overlook Hajime Nozawa, a Japanese poet, whose poems were interwoven with hismanner of living. In view of the circumstances under which Nozawa developed his
signiﬁcant activities as a poet through the observation of the behavior of nature and aman like Thoreau, the excellent poetical works he left should be more highly estimated in Japan.

Sasaki, Takuya. “The Eisenhower Administration’s Containment Policy andEast-West Exchanges, 1955–60 (Part 1).” Rikkyo Hogaku (St. Paul’s Review
of Law and Politics) 56 (August 2000): 1–33.
This article is an attempt to explore the problems involved in the East-West exchanges
that the Eisenhower administration pursued as an important strategy in containing
Soviet expansionism in the late 1950’s when the apparently dramatic rise of the Soviet
military threat shook the United States greatly.

Sato, Chitose. “Gender and Work in the American Aircraft Industry during
World War II.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 11 (2000) 147–
172.
This article examines the experiences of women workers in the aircraft industry inSouthern California during World War II. By focusing upon the efforts of major aircraft manufacturers to tap into the large reservoir of unskilled female labor, it argues
that the wartime aircraft industry successfully created “women’s” jobs by introducing
technological innovations, and tactically controlled women workers through new
types of labor-management policies.

Ueki, Teruyo. “Past, Present, and Future of Asian American Studies.” AALA
Journal (Asian American Literature Association) 6 (2000): 53–64.
This paper, which was presented at the 1999 U.S.-Japan Forum held in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of Asian American Literature Association in Japan, discusses the development of Asian American Studies on both sides of the Paciﬁc, in
relation to the changing climate of U.S.-Japan relationships over a century as it hascontributed to the making of the Japanese image of America.

Uesugi, Sayoko. “Gender, Race, and the Cold War: Mary Price and theProgressive Party in North Carolina, 1945–1948.” The North Carolina Historical Review (North Carolina Division of Archives and History) 77:3 (July
2000): 269–311.
In the 1940s, a North Carolina interracial reform group, led by a white woman, faced
the sturdy opposition of anticommunism, as well as white supremacy. This study
explores southern women’s activism for racial and economic justice in the early cold
war period, and demonstrates how the struggles were shaped by race, gender, andcold-war anticommunism.

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Uno, Hiroko. “Trees in the Poetry of Yeats and Pound.” Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship 28: 2–3 (2000): 133–148.
Ezra Pound’s early poems referring to trees, especially “The Tree,” reﬂect Yeats’s
ideas of transﬁguration and ideal beauty, as well as that of “the Tree of Life or of
Knowledge.” Pound did not imitate Yeats’s poems, but, after fully assimilating ordigesting what Yeats tried to say in his poetry, created his own poems.

Usui, Masami. “Creating a Feminist Transnational Drama: Oyako Shinju(Parent-Child Suicide) in Velina Hasu Houston’s Kokoro (True Heart).” The
Japanese Journal of American Studies 11 (2000): 173–98.
The Japanese traditional practice of Oyako shinju is examined from a feminist point ofview in the transnational era in the contemporary U.S. The Japanese cultural, social,and legal interpretations of oyako shinju confronts the American public, legal, andsocial judgment upon a Japanese female immigrant’s conﬂicts in a white male-centered country.

Usui, Masami. “The Global/Local Past Encounters with the Local/Global
Future: The Japanese Local Literature in Hawaii.” AALA Journal (Asian
American Literature Association) 6 (2000): 79–92.
The birth, improvement, strivings, and establishment of Hawaii’s local literature by
local Japanese writers, poets, and playwrights is investigated, from the immigration
period of the ﬁrst generation to the contemporary period of the sansei and yonsei generations. The space of local literature implies the paradox where the global/local pastencounters the local/global future, from the colonial, to the postcolonial and to thetransnational eras.

Yoshida, Atsushi. “Myth and Reality: The Image of the Midwestern Small
Town in the 1930s.” Doshisha American Studies (Center for American
Studies, Doshisha Univ.) 36 (2000): 133–148.
This essay examines how the Midwestern “small town” became a contested vehicle in
the interwar years of the 1930s, through which artists, writers, and regional intellectuals were able to explore and express their fears of urbanization and standardization.

Zeng, Ying. “The Changing Structure of Chinese America Communities:
Conﬂict and Cooperation in San Diego.” Asian Culture (Singapore Society of
Asian Studies) 24 (2000): 26–43.
Based on ﬁeld work in San Diego, California, this paper attempts to sort out thechanges within Chinese American communities that were wrought by demographic
changes within the overall Chinese America population and to examine the impact ofthese changes on the make-up and the interaction of the various representative communities.

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ARTICLES IN BOOKS
Baba, Minako. “The Young Gangster As Mythic American Hero: E. L.
Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate.” In Critical Essays on E.L. Doctorow, edited by
Ben Siegel. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 2000.
In Billy Bathgate (1989), set in the year 1935, Doctorow has conjured up an adolescent apprentice to Dutch Shultz, making the boy the big-time gangster’s spiritual son.
The novel is a historical fantasy of a young American hero’s perilous journey patterned after the mythic hero’s archetypal journey as discussed by Joseph Campbell.
This essay is an attempt to read Doctorow’s gangster novel as Bildungsroman and,simultaneously, to illuminate his view on the streak of lawlessness in the American
consciousness.

Fujimoto, Hitoshi. “Japan and the War in Southeast Asia, 1965–67,” InInternational Perspectives on Vietnam, edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted
Gittinger, 176–185. College Station, Texas: Texas A & M University Press,
2000.
The purpose of this article is to present an overall view of the correlation between
Japanese economic prosperity and the Vietnam War in the context of “regionalism” asan American foreign policy toward Asia during the Cold War. The article mainly covers the period from January 1965 to November 1967.

Hones, Sheila. “Natural Communities: ‘The Pauper Question’ in the Atlantic
Monthly 1880–84,” In Cultural Turns / Geographical Turns: Perspectives on
Cultural Geography, edited by Ian Cook et al., 313–28. Harlow, Essex:
Prentice Hall, 2000.
This is a case study analysis of the functioning of shared subjective geographies in the
textual discussion of perceived social problems. It considers how the Atlantic Monthly(vols. 45–54) uses a particular value-laden understanding of “nature” in its presentation of particular solutions to “the pauper question” as both moral and natural.

Ishii, Osamu. “Markets and Diplomacy: the Anglo-Japanese Rivalries over
Cotton Goods Markets, 1930–1936,” In The History of Anglo-Japanese
Relations, 1600–2000, Vol. II: The Political-Diplomatic Dimension, 1931–
2000, edited by Ian Nish and Yoichi Kibata, 51–77. London: Macmillan
Press, 2000.

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This article analyzes the diplomatic activities of the two countries over the cotton textile markets in India, Australia and other areas. The analysis is based primarily on
government documents, newspapers, and magazine articles. The article argues that
Britain’s defensive economic posture forced the Japanese to think that they were economically isolated and had to create their own economic zone in Asia.

Kitagawa Otsuru, Chieko. “Boundaries of Democracy: Citizenship, Civil
Society, and Formal Political Process,” In Nationalism and Citizenship I,
edited by Chieko Kitagawa Otsuru and Edward Rhodes, 23–34. Osaka:
National Museum of Ethnology, 2000.
This article regards the renewed interest in civic society as a key for promoting andrevitalizing democracies as suspect. It argues that civil society’s relationship with theformal political process plays a key role in making democracy promoted and democratic citizenship nurtured, both in the United States and in Japan.

DISSERTATIONS
Mizuno, Takeya. “The Civil Libertarian Press, Japanese American Press, andJapanese America Mass Evacuation,” Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri,
Columbia, 2000.
This dissertation analyzes how the civil libertarian press and Japanese American press
reported the federal government’s mass evacuation of Japanese Americans during
World War II. Three publications are chosen from each group: The New Republic,
Nation, and Crisis from the former and the Rocky Nippon, Doho, and Utah Nippo
from the latter. By employing the watchdog and foreign-language ethnic press theories, this dissertation shows that they duly fulﬁlled their journalistic roles, although
they did not vehemently challenge the policy.

Otsuka, Juro. “Individualism, Community, and Democracy: Melville’s
Critique of Liberalism in the Later Novels.” Ph.D. diss., University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, 2000.
By employing an neo-pragmatic approach, this dissertation analyzes Melville’s later
novels—Pierre, Israel Potter and The Conﬁdence-Man—for their treatment of one of
the most fundamental ethico-political problems of liberal democracy: namely, how toachieve a viable communal solidarity without attenuating the individual.

Sato, Chitose. “Women’s Work and World War II: A Comparative Historical
Study of the United States and Japan.” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2000.

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This dissertation examines how the United States and Japan mobilized women for
defense production in the 1940s by comparing the politics of women’s labor control of
the two countries. It also explores how employers on both sides of the Paciﬁc, aircraft
manufacturers in particular, attempted to utilize unskilled female labor to increase military production during World War II.

Tsuneyama, Nahoko. “The Globe upon a Hill: Reception and Transﬁgurationof Shakespeare in the Early American Theater.” Ph.D. diss., Keio University,
2000.
This dissertation examines how essential ideas conveyed by Shakespeare’s work havebeen incorporated into American literary and theatrical traditions, and how they havebeen “transﬁgured” to address contexts speciﬁc to each phase of national growth andcultural development from colonial days through the nineteenth century. My attempt
to redeﬁne the Bard as a hybrid “American” playwright contributes to the recent literary movement for reconstruction of a new multicultural history of American theater.