The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 12 (2001)

Editor’s Introduction

Globalization accelerated after 1989 when the Berlin wall collapsed.
During the process of globalization more and more goods and services,
capital, money, labor, and information penetrated into national economies so that the interdependence of the capitalist world intensiﬁed
more than ever. It can be said that the world market has been extending quantitatively as well as geographically in the half-century sinceWorld War II. These new tendencies will bring us good news and bad.
The good news is that we can enjoy high quality goods from all over
the world at less expensive prices. The bad news is that as world competition intensiﬁes more and more, ﬁrms will be obliged to restructure,making employees’ status even more vulnerable than before.
Then people will ask who is to blame for all this. Who are the main
actors in globalization? Multinational corporations? Hedge fund capitals? The U.S. government? The FRB chairman, Mr. Greenspan? The
truth may be that they are all playing some part in the process, butthere is no simple answer to the question. Unfortunately people always
seek simple answers or scapegoats. In the past we could have separated the genuine laborers who worked for wages from the adventurous
speculators who sought proﬁt margins. But now, many laborers are
deeply involved in the “speculative” stock market through stock options or retirement accounts, at least in the United States. How about
Americanization? Some would argue that globalization has promoted aworldwide Americanization which has had negative effects on othernations. This is also a tricky conclusion because there is no one“American opinion” as seen from the fact that many NGOs or labor
unions in the U.S. have vehemently opposed trade liberalization andthe integration of the market.
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2AKIMOTOAs globalization proceeds, those who are doing research on American
studies outside the U.S. ﬁnd it increasingly difﬁcult to take a balanced
view of America itself, because we ourselves are heavily affected by aglobalization drive which can often be unduly identiﬁed with Americanization. We must avoid drawing quick conclusions or making sentimental judgment without appropriate evidence on the subject.
The ﬁrst article in this volume, “Looking at the United States fromTwo Dimensions of ‘Otherness’,” by Hiroko Sato, deals with theglobalization of American studies from the perspective of women’sstudies. The former president of JAAS, Hiroko Sato read this paper as
her presidential address at the thirty-fourth annual meeting held at
Tezukayama University on June 3, 2000. Keenly observing the changing terminology and ideas of recent American Studies in the U.S., Satosuggests that a view made from the position of otherness, i.e., as both
non-American and woman, may fundamentally transform the scope ofinternationalizing American studies. The next three articles are dedicated to this issue’s main theme, “America at War: Experiences, Narratives, Legacies.” In his “Discrepancies between Rhetoric and Realities: U. S. Commitments to Its Major Wars during the Last HundredYears,” Yoshikatsu Hayashi analyzes the rhetoric of ﬁve wars fromthe Spanish-American War through the Vietnam War, stressing thecontinuity of racial prejudice that has existed since the days of war
against Native Americans. On the other hand, Hayashi argues, thereality of each battle was far distant from the rhetoric of justiﬁcation
which military requirements necessitated. Nobuo Kamioka in his“Support Our Troops: The U. S. Media and the Narrative of thePersian Gulf War,” describes the process through which the U. S. government, mass media and the military cooperated in pursuing the public campaign supporting the war. Kamioka emphasizes what waslearned from the “lost” war in Vietnam. Eikoh Ikui takes up the theme
rather differently in his “Programming Memories: The Historicizationof the Vietnam War from the 1970s through the 1990s.” Analyzingsome noted ﬁlms, Ikui paraphrases the meaning of “reprogrammingpopular memory,” and examines the way in which the history ofVietnam war has been revised in the U. S.
On general topics, Hiroyuki Matsubara in his “The Anti-Prostitution
Movement and the Contest of the Middle-Class Reformers over
Cultural Authority: San Francisco, 1910–1913,” examines the dis-

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

3courses of middle-class reformers in San Francisco in this period. Heshows how women’s re-entry into the anti-prostitution movementchanged the general landscape of debates over the theme. HideyoKonagaya takes up the topic of Taiko, or the Japanese traditional
drum, analyzing the role that this traditional community activity has
played for Japanese Americans as well as the various political, social,and cultural meanings that Taiko performances have expressed within
multicultural America.
The publication of the Journal is supported in part by a grant-in-aid
for the Publication of Scientiﬁc Research Results from the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science, for which we are deeply grateful. We welcome active responses from our readers and hope they will
be encouraged to submit 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 AkimotoEditor

4AKIMOTO

For those who wish to submit a manuscript to the Japanese
Journal of 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 300words) by mid-January. We are unable to accept the manuscript submitted without this procedure.
3. The ﬁnal manuscript (maximum 7000 words includingnotes) is due early May. The editorial committee will inform each contributor of the result of the selection processby the end of June. If accepted, the paper will be publishedin June the following year.
4. The fall issue of the JAAS Newsletter will carry “call forthe papers” announcement with exact deadlines and thespecial theme for the forthcoming issue.
5. The JAAS will accept inquiries through email:jaas-exe@ab.inbox.ne.jp