The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 11 (2000)

English-Language Works by JAAS Members
1998
The following citations and abstracts introduce recent publications and dissertations, written in English by 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, and dissertations.

ARTICLES IN JOURNALSAsada, Sadao. “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan s Decision to
Surrender—A Reconsideration.” Paciﬁc Historical Review 67:4 (1998):
477–512.
Microscopically examining Japan’s decision-making process in the days between the
Hiroshima bomb and surrender in August 1945, this article critically reviews both
American and Japanese historiography. A close study of the Japanese side of the picture shows that the arguments of the “atomic diplomacy” thesis as advanced by Gar
Alperovitz and Martin Sherwin are totally untenable.

Fujita, Hideki. “Cannibalism in Tennessee Williams’ ‘Desire and the Black
Masseur.’” Journal of the Faculty of Humanities (Toyama University) 29(1998): 73–80.
In “Desire and the Black Masseur,” Williams describes cannibalism as a sadomasochistic act in religious imagery and language, thereby revealing the signiﬁcant
link between the sensual and the spiritual. Cannibalism in this story represents a formof interpersonal union, one of Williams’s major thematic obsessions.

Fujita Hideki. “Gender Strife in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named
Desire.” New Perspective 168 (1998): 43–50.
Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire displays the intense gender struggle through theantagonism between two major characters, Stanley and Blanche. This play shows that

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the power relations between the masculine and the feminine are inextricably connected with questions of signiﬁcation and sexuality.

Fujita, Hideki. “Liminal Ambiguity in John Steinbeck’s ‘The Snake.’”
Steinbeck Studies (The John Steinbeck Society of Japan) 21(1998): 39–43.
In Steinbeck’s “The Snake,” the hero’s encounter with a mysterious woman takes on
the quality of the phase of transition in a rite of passage, a state termed liminality. The
state of liminality and the attitudes of initiates are by nature ambiguous. This paper
accounts for the imagery of ambiguity which abounds in the story.

Fujita, Hiroshi. “Public Journalism: Controversies over the Medi’as Role in1990s America.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 9 (1998): 29–52.
“Public journalism” as newly practiced in America in the 1990s is a source of great
controversy in American journalism today. The article deals with the idea behind thepractice, why it is so controversial, and what is in store for its future. It is a brief introductory paper on an up-to-date trend of American journalism.

Ide, Risako. “Small Talk and the Presentation of ‘Self’ in American Public
Discourse.” Sociolinguistics Journal of Korea 6:2 (1998): 31–50.
This article examines the interactional structure and situational functions of “small
talk,” which is a communicative genre of everyday talk, exchanged among strangers
in the public spheres of American society. Through analyzing naturally occurringinteraction at service encounter situations, I examine the processes in which speakers
cooperatively make use of small talk as an interactional platform to save interactionalface, as well as to perform and present the image of ‘self.’

Kamioka, Nobuo. “Cyberpunk Revisited: William Gibson’s Neuromancer
and the ‘Multimedia Revolution’.” The Japanese Journal of American
Studies 9 (1998): 53–68.
This paper examines how accurately William Gibson’s Neuromancer predicted thecoming “multimedia revolution,” and how the setting of the novel differs from theworld we live in now. The conclusion is that this difference is caused by the author’s
lack of sufﬁcient attention to our physical context, which may be the very thing wemust retain in the face of the prevailing virtual world.

Kurihara, Ryoko. “Women in the Progressive Era: The Issue of Birth Control
in the 1910s and After.” Iwate Prefectural University Morioka JuniorCollege Bulletin (1998): 1–26.
This essay focuses on the issue of birth control in the 1910s. The difference between
Margaret Sanger’s position and that of other radicals who were working for the use ofbirth control is the theme. In addition to examining their ideas of birth control, therelationship between the idea of birth control and radicalism is reconsidered.

Kusama Hidesaburo. “US-Japanese Fact-ﬁnding of the B29 Crash on MarchENGLISH-LANGUAGE WORKS IN 1998

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10, 1945 at Itabashi Mura, Japan.” Journal of the Faculty of Foreign Studies(Aichi Prefectural University) 31 (1999): 1–40.
The paper is a report on the investigation of three American soldiers who survived thecrash of a B29 at a village about 25 miles northeast of Tokyo during the Great Tokyo
Air Raid. The three were dramatically rescued by villagers but later one was killed by
the Japanese military police and two died in a POW ﬁre.

Ma, Xiaohua. “A Democracy at War: The American Campaign to Repeal
Chinese Exclusion in 1943.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 9(1998): 121–42.
This paper explores how American foreign policy inﬂuenced its immigration policy
during World War II. It focuses on the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1943.
By examining the interaction between American domestic politics and its foreign policy, it shows that the abrogation of the Chinese Exclusion Acts not only marked a historical turning point in American immigration policy, but also had a great impact on
the policy-making process regarding East Asia, especially China.

Masuda, Hikaru. “The Tarnished Angels (1958): William Faulkner’s Pylon(1935) Transforms into Sirkian Melodrama.” Bulletin of Tokyo Junshin
Women’s College 2 (1998): 73–86.
This article explores how Douglas Sirk recreated in The Tarnished Angels William
Faulkner’s Pylon, which depicted the density, confusion, and acceleration of the technological post-World War I era. The central concern is to seek stylistic equivalencies
and transmutations across the two media especially in the time of CinemaScope andwidescreen cinema.

Miyao, Daisuke. “Blue vs. Red: Takeshi Kitano’s Color Scheme.” Post
Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities (Texas A&M University) 18:1
(Fall 1998): 112–27.
This article is a study dealing with seven of Takeshi Kitano’s ﬁlms, from Violent Cop
to Fireworks, which shows how colors—especially the so-called Kitano Blue—reinforce the thematic context of these ﬁlms and how we can place them in the dialectical
function of color between spectacle and realism.

Miyao, Daisuke. “Doubleness: Images of Japanese Men in American Silent
Films.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 9 (1998): 69–95.
This article, which deals with the American silent spy ﬁlm genre, explores the transformation of ambivalent images of Japanese men in the early twentieth century. It discusses how the double image of Japanese men, an image at the same time favorable
and attractive, and threatening to the Western world, was formed and exploited in
Hollywood.

Mizuno, Yumiko. “Diné bi Olta or School of the Navajos: Educational

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Experiments at Rough Rock Demonstration School, 1966–70.” The Japanese
Journal of American Studies 9 (1998): 143–69.
In 1966, Rough Rock Demonstration School launched innovative educational programs on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, which enhanced the favorable response
among Navajo people toward schooling. This essay explores innovations at the schoolin its formative years and analyzes the revealed of the school in the history of Native
American education.

Murakami, Yosuke. “The Death of Jim Loney as a Bicultural Novel.”
Joshidai Bungaku (Department of English, Osaka Women’s University) 50(1998): 59–84.
Read from the European-American monocultural perspective, James Welch’s The
Death of Jim Loney is often understood to be a novel about the alienation and loss ofthe half-breed protagonist. In actuality, it is a memorable bicultural novel, in which
the author explicitly endorses Native American cultural values.

Numaoka, Tsutomu. “Josiah Collins III, A successful Corn Planter: A Look
at His Plantation Management Techniques.” The Japanese Journal of
American Studies 9 (1998): 97–120.
This paper shows how Josiah Collins III produced corn commercially with considerable success. With a sophisticated production system characterized by mechanization,a streamlined water transportation system, and scientiﬁc farming, Collins continued to
produce large amounts of corn throughout the antebellum period. His success was also
the result of his skillful management of slave labor, which was clearly revealed in his
management of the Negro Patch.

Ochiai, Akiko. “African American Agrarianism in the Sea Islands during the
Early Reconstruction (2): The Land Sales and Preemption Rights.” Journal of
Cultural Science (Kobe University of Commerce) 33:4 (March 1998):
535–604; “African American Agrarianism in the Sea Islands during the Early
Reconstruction (3): The Promise of the Sherman Reservation.” Journal of
Cultural Science (Kobe University of Commerce) 34:1–2 (December 1998):
213–62.
These papers are the second and third of three chapters articulating freedpeople’s
efforts to own land in lowcountry South Carolina during the early Reconstrucion period (1861–1866). The second chapter examines land sales for unpaid federal taxes in
the Sea Islands in 1863 and 1864. The third chapter focuses on the turmoil overSpecial Field Orders No. 15 (January 1865), allotting 40-acre-tracts to African
American families along the lowcountry coast.

Okamura, Reimei. “US-Japan Relations and the Media in the Information
Age: Coverage of the American Bases Issue in Okinawa.” The Japanese
Journal of American Studies 9 (1998): 5–27.

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In this article, the author discusses US-Japan relations in the Information Age, especially concerning the role of the media in both countries. The article is based on comparative studies of coverages by the American, the Japanese (mainland) and the
Okinawan medias on the American bases issue in 1995.

Onishi, Takehito and Yuasa, Manabu. “Migration and the World System:
Possibilities of PCA for the Study of Migration.” Aichi Daigaku Keizai
Ronshu 146 (1998): 27–40.
Principal Component Analysis and its extensions, including the time-derivative of a
key variable, are combined to yield a dynamic and structural system analysis of migration. This study shows that Asian migration affects the historical change of the global
real-wage structure.

Oshio, Kazuto. “Learning to Balance Efﬁciency, Equity and Ecology: A New
Direction of Water Resources Policy.” Japan Women’s University Studies inEnglish (Department of English, Japan Women’s University) 33 (1998):
71–88.
Through historical analysis of water policies in the American West, this paper critically examines a generolicy trend toward the “commodiﬁcation” of water “treating it
more as an economic good in the market than a gift of nature” and concludes by recognizing the need and the difﬁculty of balancing multiple values of water.

Shimada, Noriko. “Wartime Dissolution and Revival of the Japanese
Language Schools in Hawai’i: Persistence of Ethnic Culture.” Journal of
Asian American Studies 1:2 (1998): 121–51.
This paper uncovers the wartime power dynamics involved in the issue of dissolutionof Japanese language schools in Hawai’i and the postwar process of their revival. It
analyzes the various elements in the Japanese community from patriotic Nisei groups
to pro-Japanese Issei groups, and evaluates the meaning of ethnic cultural persistence.

Uno, Hiroko. “‘Chemical Conviction’: Dickinson, Hitchcock, and the Poetryof Science.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 7:2 (1998): 95–111.
By examining Dickinson’s poems along with Edward Hitchcock’s lectures and the science textbooks she used, the paper discusses the inﬂuence of Hitchcock’s scientiﬁcthinking upon her poetry. Especially, it shows how she struggled to cope with science’s threat to faith and tried to ﬁnd her own solution by adopting his arguments andby using her own knowledge of science.

Uno, Hiroko. “Geology in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry (1).” Memoirs of theFaculty of Education, Shiga University 48:2 (1998): 83–92.
Dickinson was inspired by geological knowledge gained from Hitchcock’s textbook
Elementary Geology and from the magazine The Atlantic Monthly, and subtly andeffectively incorporated not only the information but also the terminology into her

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poems. In this paper, I examine “Comparative anatomy,” volcanoes, and fossils in her
poetry.

Usui, Masami. “‘Dreams and Nightmares, nightmares and dreams’ in Velina
Hasu Houston’s America Dreams,” Kansai American Literature 35 (1998):
32–54.
This research note explores the second play of Houston’s trilogy describing theJapanese “war brides,” here in the context of a newly-born racial/cultural/socio-economic conﬂict between the native Japanese female immigrant who married an
African-Native American G.I. and his bafﬂed family in the enclosed and imprisoned
space of a New York apartment.

Usui, Masami. “Japan’s Democratization—Agrarian Reform and Women’s
Liberation—in Velina Hasu Houston’s Asa Ga Kimashita [Morning Has
Broken].” AALA Journal 5 (1998):11–25.
This paper discusses Houston’s ﬁrst play, one of her trilogy describing Japanese “warbrides,” as a family tragedy caused by the post-war democratization of Japan that wasforced by the G.H.Q. in the aftermath of World War II, especially the Agarian
Reform. In this play, these reforms cause the suicide of the protagonist’s father andlead to women’s liberation, both of which inﬂuence the daughter’s decision to marryan American G.I. and leave Japan after her parents’ death.

Usui, Masami. “Voices from the ‘netherworld’: Japanese International Brides
in Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea.” Chu-Shikoku Studies in American Literature
34 (1998): 45–64.
This paper examines the last play of Houston’s trilogy describing Japanese “warbrides” in a geo/historical and socio/political context, and it explores the long-neglected and lost voices of the Japanese women, who were transplanted into a segregatedcommunity of an army base town in the Midwest, using the frame of the spiritual andsupernatural space of their tea ceremony.

Yokota, Kazunori. “The Signiﬁcance of Italicized Words: On T.B. Thorpe’s‘The Big Bear of Arkansas’.” Gifu Women’s University Journal of English
Literature Society I 159:36 (March 1998): 135–47.
The power of narration gouges out the kernel of reality which crouches in the innermost recesses of the story. This reality has some taste of unreality, but still must be,beyond doubt, reality itself. The complex structure of Chinese boxes increases the narrative power, which will be considered mainly through T.B. Thorpe’s “The Big Bearof Arkansas” (1841).

Yorifuji, Michio. “On the Relation between Man and Nature in Faulkner andThoreau.” The Tsuru University Review 49 (October 1998): 37–46.
William Faulkner and Henry David Thoreau both thought over the deep relation

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between man and nature. Something in common is found in Faulkner and Thoreau in
their views of nature though they were quite different from each other in their native
place and social backgrounds. They believed in the reformation and rebirth of man innature.

Yorifuji, Michio. “A Consideration on the Families in the Faulkner
Literature.” Tsuru Studies in English Linguistics and Literature 26 (March
1998): 21–29.
William Faulkner built the grand imaginative world of the “Yokknapatawpha Saga,”
which mainly grappled with the decay of Southern planters. He also described the riseof the new upstart family, the Snopeses. In Faulkner’s world, families are very important elements which have a deep inﬂuence upon characters and events. It may safely
be said that families take the leading parts in his novels.

Zeng, Ying. “Development of San Diego Chinese American Community: A
Preliminary Investigation.” Chinese America: History and Perspective 11(1998): 49–57.
This preliminary examination of the San Diego Chinese American community reveals
a vibrant, living community never able to establish a lasting Chinatown. Through literature search and extensive ﬁeldwork, this project maps the changes in the Chinese
American communities brought about by historical developments, and seeks to understand the problems the communities currently face.

Zmijewski, David. “Busting His Way to Freedom: Huck Finn’s EscapeThrough Violence.” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of theSouth 6: 1 (Spring 1995): 75–98.
Domestic, fantasy, racial, mob and criminal violence are major conditions of theSouthern social structure in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). By studying Twain’s development ofviolence in these two novels and showing how that violence affects Huck and Tom, I
argue that the much debated ending of Huck Finn legitimatizes Huck’s escape fromthe repressive slaveholding oligarchy.

ARTICLES IN BOOKS
Ishida, Atsushi. “Electoral Incentives and the Political Economy of National
Defense Spending Decisions.” In Strategic Politicians, Institutions andForeign Policy, 169–91, Randolph M. Siverson. Ann Arbor, MI: The
University of Michigan Press, 1998.

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This essay presents a two-level game model of the national defense spending decisions of a democracy. By specifying the economic roles of a democratic government
and the institutional features of its domestic decision-making process, this article identiﬁes and analyzes both the domestic and international origins of the demand for
defense spending.

Murakata, Akiko. “Politics of Contemporaneity: A Cross-Cultural Reading of
Oe Kenzaburo and Seamus Heaney.” In The View from Kyoto: Essays on
Twentieth Century Poetry, 319–44, Sakurai Shoichiro. Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten,
1998.
This paper is based on the lecture “Two Nobel Laureates” given on 3 September, 1997
as part of the Third Extension Lectures, the Faculty of Integrated Human Studies,
which was published in Ibunka tono Deai [Encounters with Other Cultures: theIndividual and the Society in the Age of Globalization], (Kyoto U.P., 1998): 83–126.

Saito, Noboru. “The Mainspring of Washington Irving’s literature.” In A
Critical Guide for Cultural Studies, 333–41, Noboru Saito. Tokyo: OzoraSha, 1998.
Considering that Washington Irving had long cherished a deep aspiration for the history and traditions of Europe, it can readily be imagined how remarkably he wasenlightened by his encounter with Walter Scott. This article characterizes the revelation as reﬂected in his literature such as The Sketch Book.

Tôyama, Kiyoko. “A Huge Parable on Peace—Faulkner’s War and Peace,”
Faulkner: Achievement and Endurance, Selected Papers, International
Conference on William Faulkner, Tao Jie. Peking: Peking University Press,
1998.
William Faulkner’s A Fable has long been neglected, with reason: the novel cannot beapproached by usual aesthetic criticisms; it is an “indictment of war,” published at theheight of the cold war between the US and the USSR, and this century has continued
to be one of wars even after the end of the cold war. Reading the book as played out
on the Japanese scene, this paper concludes that we have to carry the dream of everlasting peace pledged in Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, and “not to let it drop,
falter, pause for even a second.”

Yuasa, Shigehiro. “Japanese Views on China During and Immediately after
the War.” In George Marshall’s Mediation Mission to China, December
1945-January 1947, 445–59, Larry I. Brand. Lexington, Va.: George C.
Marshall Foundation, 1998.
Japan had two views on China, “weak and divided China” and “China as anti-Western
ally,” during the Second World War. These views produced confusion and distortionin the Japanese China policies during World War II and on into the cold war period.

Zeng, Ying. “A Chinese American Community in a Non-Chinatown Setting.”

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In Ethnic Chinese at the Turn of the Centuries, 422–42, Zhuang Guotu.
Xiamen: Fujian Renmin Press, 1998.
This project is based on ﬁeld work conducted in San Diego, home to a thriving anddiverse Chinese American community that has to date been overlooked. It introduces
the history of the San Diego community and then ventures observations on thechanges which have taken place within the community.

DISSERTATIONS
Ide, Risako. “‘Small Talk’ in Service Encounters: The Creation of Self andCommunal Space through Talk in America.” Ph.D. dissertation, University ofTexas at Austin, 1998.
This dissertation concerns “small talk,” which is a communicative genre of everyday
talk, exchanged among strangers in the public spheres of American society. Based on
ethnographic observations and micro-analysis of videotaped interaction at service
encounters, the study locates small talk as an interactional sphere in which the sense of‘public self’ and ‘community’ are constituted, negotiated, and performed through ordinary talk.

Ishii, Noriko Kawamura. “American Women Missionaries at Kobe College,
1873–1909.” Ph.D. dissertation, George Washington University, 1998.
This dissertation examines the role of American women missionaries at Kobe College.
Identifying professionalization of the missionaries beginning in the early 1880s as an
impetus for the college scheme, this study shows that the school provided a rich
opportunity for educated, Christian American women to exercise unusual autonomy.
Japanese students, however, also gained the Western skills and independent minds
useful to a new elite. The school served the interests of women from two divergent
cultures.

Takai, Yukari. “Migration, Family, and Gender: A Longitudinal Analysis of
French-Canadian Immigrants in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1900–1920.” Ph.D.
dissertation, Université de Montréal, 1998.
This work analyzes the impact of the radical socioeconomic changes that occurred inQuebec and New England in the process of French Canadians’ migration to, and settlement in, Lowell in the early twentieth century. This study also seeks to shed light ongender relations within immigrant families. To achieve these objectives, the researchmethodology of this analysis combines assessment of nominative records and qualitative sources.

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Yasutake, Rumi. “Transnational Women’s Activism: The Woman’s ChristianTemperance Union in Japan and Beyond, 1858–1920.” Ph.D. dissertation,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1998.
The dissertation examines the spread of the women’s activism of the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union from the United States to Japan, and back to Issei communities in northern California in the context of America’s global expansion andJapan’s aspirations for imperialistic power between 1858 and 1920.

Zeng, Ying. “The Changing Nature of Chinese American Communities: San
Diego As a Case Study.” Ph.D. dissertation, International Christian University, 1998.
The combination of historical research and ﬁeldwork in this study provides a contextualized examination of Chinese American communities in San Diego as well as thebasis for discussing scholarly approaches to Chinese American history. It also seeks to
examine the nature of a Chinese American community in a non-Chinatown setting andcorrect the current imbalance in the study of Chinese American communities.

Zmijewski, David. “Huck Finn and Hawaii: A Study of Hawaiian Inﬂuenceon the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Hawaii at Manoa, 1998.
This dissertation investigates the signiﬁcance of the 1866 Hawaii sojourn on MarkTwain and advances the thesis that Twain did make use of Hawaiian material. Aftererecting a historical paradigm to discuss the social, political and cultural situation in
the islands as well as investigating the sources that inﬂuenced Twain, this study shows
how those Hawaiian materials, images, natural scenery, people and culture, wereincorporated into his later ﬁction, especially The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885).