The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 32 (2021)

English-Language Works by JAAS Members
2019
The following citations and abstracts introduce recent publications written inEnglish by members of the Japanese Association for American Studies on topics
related to American Studies.

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS
Arnold, Wayne E. “Henry Miller and Ueno Shōri: A Transpacific Friendship.”
Faculty of Foreign Studies Bulletin (University of Kitakyushu) 149 (2019): 1–28.
Ueno Shōri wrote extensively in Japanese about Miller and published several books andarticles dealing with Miller’s intellectual ideas. The two men also exchanged more thanfour hundred letters. In this article Arnold examines their fifteen-year friendship andexplains how Ueno’s letters were an important source of information about Japan forMiller.

Arnold, Wayne E. “Japan Field Research on Henry Miller.” Critical Asian Studies
Commentary & Opinions 13 (2019).
By describing the author’s interview with Koga Tsutomu, who maintainedcorrespondence with Miller, in this short article Arnold discusses the benefit of goingoutside the archive library and pursuing field research to enrich and enliven academicwriting. The conversation with Koga helped illuminate a deeper understanding of thisfriendship.

Arnold, Wayne E. “The Letters of Henry Miller to Bezalel Schatz: 1945–1978.”
DELTA: Studies on Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Lawrence Durrell 11 (2019): 3–75.
In this article Arnold examines the recently discovered letters between Miller and Schatz
and provides a summary of their correspondence. Schatz was friends with Miller during

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the Big Sur years; over the decades, Miller shared significant personal information. The
whereabouts of these letters were unknown by Miller scholars until they were located inJapan.

Asakawa, Tomoyuki. “‘Old Sport’ Is Jay Gatsby’s Way of Life: Familiarity,
Snobbery, Ridicule, and Failure.” Bulletin of the Institute of Human Sciences(Institute of Human Sciences, Toyo University) 21 (2019): 27– 43.
In this article Asakawa discusses the repeated use of the phrase “old sport” in The Great
Gatsby. Jay Gatsby, the enigmatic central character, utters this phrase forty-two times inthe novel. One can argue that the phrase encapsulates the nature of the kind of life
Gatsby led.

Chan, Edward K., and Patricia Ventura. “Introduction: Articulating Race andUtopia.” Utopian Studies (Society for Utopian Studies) 30 (2019): 1–7.
Editors Chan and Ventura provide this introduction to the special issue of UtopianStudies on race and utopia. Their introduction places the five articles in the special issue
in the context of previous scholarship on race and utopia.

Inoue, Hiroyuki. “‘A Southern California Beach That Never Was’: Adapting theNoir City in Inherent Vice.” Gengo Bunka (Institute for Language and Culture, Meiji
Gakuin University) 36 (2019): 203–17.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s cinematic adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice isunique in its representation of Los Angeles. With its deliberately fragmented andconfined narrative space, Anderson’s film reimagines the city that has appeared in many
film noirs, while also building connections with the extratextual city in terms of both
geography and historiography.

Itoh, Shoko. “Survey on the Ecocritical Studies of Herman Melville: From Cetology
to Material Ecocriticism.” Sky-Hawk (Journal of the Melville Society of Japan) 7(2019): 107–17.
Melville shared a concern for the environment with Thoreau, who sensed a crisis inAmerican civilization during his travels in the Maine Woods. While Thoreau established
an American Jeremiad discourse in The Maine Woods (1864), Melville provided aprophetic environmental idea of interrelationships between the human and nonhumanmarine world.

Kawamura, Mami. “A New Notion of Culture in Liberal Multiculturalism: Alan
Patten and His Critics.” Kobe University Law Review (Graduate School of Law,
Kobe University) 52 (2019): 45–60.
In this article Kawamura critically reexamines the notion of culture by comparing Alan
Patten’s formulations with those of Will Kymlicka. The author shows that Patten’s new

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notion of culture, which focuses on social relationships, extends the scope of the agentof collective rights to temporary workers or refugees and provides stronger justification
for their rights.

Nagatomi, Mari. “Proletariats or Merchants of Death?: Transnational Cowboys andthe Crisis of Japanese Communists’ Masculinities in the Early 1960s.” Doshisha
American Studies (International Institute of American Studies, Doshisha University)
55 (2019): 31–55.
In this article Nagatomi examines how and why the Japanese Communists understood
cowboy images in the early 1960s. By introducing their various interpretations of thissymbol, the author argues that these Communists used the image of cowboys to convey
the idea of brave men who could overturn society, which they believed to be dominatedby the bourgeoisie and violence.

Park, Soonyoung. “Frederick Douglass and His Strategic Use of Photography as
Visual Voice.” Treatises and Studies by the Faculty of Kinjo Gakuin University
Studies in Humanities 16, no. 1 (2019): 95–109.
In focusing on the relation between Frederick Douglass and photography, Park
elucidates Douglass’s strategic use of three voices: oration as physical, autobiography asreadable, and photography as visual voice; all three voices are in a reciprocal andcomplementary relationship. Park concludes that Douglass continues to exercise
authorship, power, and influence over his self-image through his photography.

Suzuki, Motoko. “The Intercourse between Japan and Southeast Asia: Centering on
Shusaku Endo’s Silence.” China-USA Business Review (David Publishing) 18, no. 2(2019): 13–22.
In this article Suzuki explores encounters between Japan and the rest of the world,
especially Southeast Asia, that arose through literature, such as The Travels of Marco
Polo, Gulliver’s Travels, Moby-Dick, and, mainly, Shusaku Endo’s Silence.

Takanashi, Yoshio. “Emerson’s ‘God-Within’ and the Buddhist ‘Buddha-Womb.’”
Journal of East-West Thought (International Association for East-West Studies) 9,
no. 1 (March 2019): 1–14.
Emerson wrote of his discovery of a “God-within” in his journal. Reading theBhagavad-Gita, he learned of the Upanishad doctrine of the identity of Brahman andAtman. The conception of “Buddha-womb” was incorporated into the Mahayana
Buddhism influenced by the Hindu doctrine. It is no wonder that Daisetsu Suzuki
exclaimed, “Emerson preached on the cultivation of the mind in the same way as Zendoes!”

Takezawa, Yasuko. “Encounters with Transmigrants and a Navaho Chef: YokoInoue. Special Issue Trans-Pacific Japanese Diaspora Art: Encounters and Envisions

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ENGLISH-LANGUAGE WORKS IN 2019of Minor-Transnationalism.” Amerasia Journal 45, no. 3 (2019): 391–95.
In this article, Takezawa discusses works by the New York–based multimedia artist
Yoko Inoue, Tea Taste Democracy and Upside-Down Objects. The author explains how
these works were created in the context of post-9/11 New York using the concept of“minor transnationalism.” From the symposium “Trans-Pacific Japanese Diaspora Art:
Encounters and Envisions of Minor-Transnationalism,” which was held on December 8,
2018, in Tokyo as a Kyoto University Zinbunken Academy.

Takezawa, Yasuko, and Laura Kina. “Introduction: Trans-Pacific Japanese Diaspora
Art: Encounters and Envisions of Minor-Transnationalism.” Amerasia Journal 45,
no. 3 (2019): 373–76.
The authors provide an introduction to six reflective articles by participants at theinternational symposium “Trans-Pacific Japanese Diaspora Art: Encounters andEnvisions of Minor-Transnationalism,” which was held on December 8, 2018, in Tokyo
as a Kyoto University Zinbunken Academy.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. “The Advent of Asian Speculative Fiction: In Response to Wai
Chee Dimock’s Reading of The Three-Body Problem.” AALA Journal, no. 25 (30thAnniversary Issue), (2019): 16–26.
This article was originally written as a long response to the keynote speech of Wai Chee
Dimock on Chinese speculative fictionist Cixin Liu’s global bestseller The Three-BodyProblem delivered at the 30th anniversary forum of AALA (Asian American Literature
Association in Japan) held in Kobe in September 2019.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. “Dr. Franklin’s Children: Kant, Shelley and Priest.” Colloquia
40 (2019): 97–107.
It is Immanuel Kant who nicknamed Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of
the United States, as “Modern Prometheus.” In this article Tatsumi investigates the way
this nickname inspired Mary Shelley to come up with the idea of her novelFrankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which was the genesis of the genre ofscience fiction.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. “In Pym’s Footsteps: Poe, Ooka, and Ballard.” Edgar Allan PoeReview 20, no. 1 (2019): 110–25.
Expanding on the author’s plenary lecture given at the International Poe and Hawthorne
Conference at Kyoto Garden Palace in June 2018, Tatsumi weaves out the transnational
impact of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket on Ooka Shohei’s Fireson the Plain, which further influenced J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World.

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ARTICLES IN BOOKS
Chan, Edward K. “The White Power Utopia and the Reproduction of VictimizedWhiteness,” in Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society, ed.
Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan,2019): 139–59.
In this article Chan analyzes two novels, each of which imagines an ethnonational
utopia based on racial whiteness, in the context of the ideologies of white supremacy,
white nationalism, and white separatism. Both novels draw on (and exaggerate) fears ofwhite people as victims as they fall from majority to minority status (as compared to allother nonwhite people).

Moriya, Tomoe. “The Eastward Transmission of Buddhism across the Pacific: TheDevelopment of Buddhist Missions in Hawaii and Mainland United States,” inGlobalizing Asian Religions: Management and Marketing, ed. Wendy Smith,Hirochika Nakamaki, et al. (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2019):
259–75.
In this article Moriya explores the expansion of Japanese Buddhist denominations in
prewar Hawaii and California. The author demonstrates that the process of religious
expansion was often driven by a demand from the Japanese diaspora. She also shows therole of lay Buddhists in its development, including the Buddhist social ethics that grewout of engagement with labor movements.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. “Thinking After the Hemispheric: ‘The Planetary Expanse ofTransnational American Writing,’” in The Routledge Companion to Transnational
American Studies, ed. Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi(London: Routledge, 2019): 357–69.
As one of the editors of the Journal of Transnational American Studies inaugurated in2009, the author and his colleagues joined forces to publish this collection of essays.
This article analyzes the cultural negotiations between the Monroe Doctrine and William
Faulkner’s novel The Wild Palms.

BOOKS
Hisano, Ai. Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What We Eat(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

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Visualizing Taste explores how our perceptions of what food should look like havechanged over the course of more than a century. By examining the development ofcolor-controlling technology, government regulation, and consumer expectations,
Hisano demonstrates that scientists, farmers, food processors, dye manufacturers,
government officials, and intermediate suppliers have created a version of “natural” thatis, in fact, highly engineered.

Izumi, Masumi. The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil
Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019).
In this book Izumi dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil
liberties by examining how Japanese American wartime incarceration generated theEmergency Detention Act of 1950, which legalized preventive detention and expanded aubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America. The author also shows how
the memory of Japanese American incarceration helped repeal this law in 1971.

Okayama, Hiroshi. Judicializing the Administrative State: The Rise of theIndependent Regulatory Commissions in the United States, 1883–1937 (New York:Routledge, 2019).
Through arguing that the US administrative state judicialization from the turn of thetwentieth century was caused by the institutional combination of common law and thepresidential system, Okayama analyzes the creation and development of independent
regulatory commissions explicitly modeled after courts. The commissions judicialized
the state through their proliferation and the diffusion of their formal procedures toexecutive agencies.

Ventura, Patricia, and Edward K. Chan, eds. Race and Utopian Desire in American
Literature and Society (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
This anthology includes essays that examine the confluence of issues regarding raceand utopian desire in a broad range of texts from the mid-nineteenth century to thetwenty-first. The fifteen chapters include discussions of classic texts such as Narrativeof the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), overlooked works such as Pauline Hopkins’s
Of One Blood (1902–3), and recent works of Afrofuturism including N. K. Jemisin’s
Dreamblood Duology (2012).

Yoshihara, Mari. Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World
Maestro (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Dearest Lenny interweaves an intimate story of love with the making of Leonard
Bernstein as a world maestro during the second half of the twentieth century. Throughthe story of Bernstein’s relationships with two Japanese individuals, the book examines
the relationships between art and commerce, artists and the state, private and public, andJapan and the United States.

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DISSERTATIONS
Matsusaka, Hiroaki. “Border Crossings: Anti-Imperialism and Race-Making inTranspacific Movements, 1910–1951.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2019.
Matsusaka examines how Korean and Japanese migrant activists in cities like New
York, Chicago, Seoul, and Tokyo developed global anti-imperial thought and practices
from the 1910s through the 1940s. The author argues that interracial encounters of theactivists, such as their relationships with other Asians, African Americans, and migrantwhites, were central to the development of their political ideas and cultural expressions.

Nagatomi, Mari. “Tokyo Rodeo: Transnational Country Music and the Crisis ofJapanese Masculinities.” PhD diss., Doshisha University, 2019.
Nagatomi investigates why Japanese men have consumed American country music andthe cowboy images that served as the music’s main symbol. Dealing with four decades
from the 1920s to the early 1960s, the author argues that Japanese men used Americancountry music as a battlefield to define masculinity and their nation.