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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 16 (2005)

Editor’s Introduction

At the annual meeting of the American Studies Association held in Atlanta,
Georgia, in November 2004, more than twenty journal editors from around theworld gathered to introduce to each other what they have been publishing in theﬁeld of American studies. The missions of their respective journals were varied:some emphasized the promotion of American Studies in their own country, others suggested trans-Atlantic approaches, and yet others emphasized cross-cultural and comparative perspectives. It was a very special occasion throughwhich the participants could observe the diversity of our world as represented
in the ﬁeld of American Studies.
Elaborating on the purpose of the Japanese Journal of American Studies isbeyond the scope of this introduction. What I would like to emphasize here isthat the editorial committee feels privileged to publish works written by Japanbased scholars specializing in American Studies and believes that the varietyof topics and approaches represented in the journal attest to the richness of theﬁeld. We hope to take part in those conversations and discussions held in Japanand various places around the world—what is the purpose of studying “different” cultures and histories? How do we, as editors and scholars, locate ourselves
and identify “our” community? What future can we envision through our collective effort? In short, we hope that our journal will be read as a contribution
to the call for an increasing internationalization of American Studies heard
across various geographical regions and academic disciplines.
The ﬁrst essay in this volume, edited under the special theme “The Paciﬁcand America,” is an ambitious work that deals directly with the questions raisedabove. In “Transcending the Western Paradigm of the Idea of Race,” Yasuko
Takezawa presents comparative and conceptual analyses of the idea of “race”
that encompass both the western and non-western worlds. Using the abundant
literature on the subject available in Japan and in the West, she concludes thatthe idea of “race” should not be approached solely from American or Western
perspectives, and that we need to contextualize ideas of race as they are represented in different regions and cultures.
The next three essays deal with the multifaceted relationship between Japan1

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and the United States observed on both sides of the Paciﬁc. In “Onoto Watanna’s
Japanese Collaborators and Commentators,” Yuko Matsukawa analyzes a fascinating author of the early 20th century, Winnifred Eaton, writing as OnotoWatanna, who fabricated for herself an ancestral connection with Japan,
although she had never visited Japan nor had any relatives there. Closely examining the possible collaborations she had with Japanese writers and artists, andthe ways in which she was represented in the United States, Matsukawa argues
that Eaton, with the help of her “oriental” friends, successfully and deftly“enacted mainstream orientalist fantasies, exploiting the discourse that feminized and aestheticized Japan.”
The essay by Rui Kohiyama deals with a fascinating episode in U.S.-Japan
relations, the doll exchange that took place in 1927. In “To Clear up a Cloud
Hanging on the Paciﬁc Ocean: The 1927 Japan-U.S. Doll Exchange,”
Kohiyama analyzes how the project, motivated by missionary ideas and coordinated by Christian women’s movements, became subjected to the political
agenda of the U.S. and Japanese governments. In the process, she argues, women’s roles as well as the “Christian” aspects of the exchange were overshadowed by the discourse of “power” and “nation.”
Teruko Kumei’s paper, “Crossing the Ocean, Dreaming of America,
Dreaming of Japan: Transpaciﬁc Transformation of Japanese Immigrants inSenryu Poems, 1929–1941,” focuses on senryu poems composed by Japaneseimmigrants to the United States. Perusing Japanese language newspapers andmagazines published in the United States during the two decades before the outbreak of the Paciﬁc War, Kumei narrates the lives of Japanese immigrants as
expressed through numerous senryu poems. What she recovers here are “important historical resources to an understanding of the daily lives and bare sentiments of Japanese immigrants in the United States,” which enable us to understand the multifarious experiences of the Japanese community in a critical
period in history.
The next essay by Gayle K. Sato delves into the question of memory, narrative reenactment, paciﬁsm, and the American Paciﬁc, as represented in the novels of Maxine Hong Kingston. In “Reconﬁguring the ‘American Paciﬁc’:Narrative Reenactments of Viet Nam in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The FifthBook of Peace,” Sato argues that Kingston, inspired by such various incidents
as the Oakland-Berkeley Fire of 1991, the Viet Nam War and other UnitedStates Wars in Asia and the Middle East, as well as her experiences leading
writing workshops for veterans of the Viet Nam War, has written a distinctly
paciﬁst treatise in The Fifth Book of Peace. Analyzing Kingston’s latest workin comparison with her earlier works, Sato dissects how Kingston reconstructs
America’s Asian wars, intertwining gender and geography in order to shed lighton the nature of the American Paciﬁc, and concludes that Kingston demonstrates
the importance of narrative reenactments of war and peace in nurturing grassroots peace activism.

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EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

3“The Political Science Fiction of Challenge to America” by Marie Thorsten
is the ﬁfth contribution to our special theme, “The Paciﬁc and America.” In analyzing Challenge to America, a documentary produced by the PBS in 1993,
Thorsten argues that in trying to answer the question of what happened to corporate America, at the time apparently losing ground to Germany and Japan,
the ﬁlm tends to emphasize the “otherness” of Germany and Japan while at thesame time insisting on the need to “learn from them.” Pointing out the “borrowed motifs from actual science ﬁction” strewn throughout the ﬁlm, she concludes that in the end, it advocated “‘a new social compact’ to join corporations,families and schools” to make the United States more competitive, thus encouraging the sense of national unity among the American people.
The next two essays analyze the variety of American experiences in Asia.
“American Missionaries in Korea and U.S.-Japan Relations 1910–1920” by
Akifumi Nagata focuses on the role of American missionaries in Korea during
the ﬁrst decade of the Japanese annexation of that country. The missionaries inKorea sympathized with the Koreans and strongly criticized the harsh treatmentof the Koreans by the Japanese authorities. Although the missionaries did nothave much room for maneuver, especially since the U.S. government had nointention of antagonizing the Japanese government because of the Korean problem, Nagata argues that they made a lasting impression on Korean society, animpression which became clearly apparent after the end of Japan’s rule.
Satoshi Nakano’s “South to South across the Paciﬁc: Ernest E. Neal and theCommunity of Development Efforts in the American South and the Philippines”
introduces the unique experience of an individual whose “particular ‘domestic’social experience in the United States” meant that he “found himself surrounded by things familiar to him in such distant countries as India and thePhilippines.” Ernest E. Neal, one of the ﬁrst African American foreign aid ofﬁcers, started his career devoted to “community development” in Tyler, Texas,and during the next four decades was stationed in India, the Philippines, andGhana, pursuing community development projects aimed at solving rural people’s economic problems through “aided self-help.” What makes him signiﬁcant, Nakano argues, is not what he was able to achieve but rather his reﬂections upon his failures and his helplessness, as well as his perception that “painand sorrow under colonial situations” existed on both sides of the Paciﬁc.
The last essay in this volume, by Kenji Kajiya, presents an analysis ofAmerican art critic Clement Greenberg, an inﬂuential ﬁgure in the mid- to late20th century art world. In “Deferred Instantaneity: Clement Greenberg’s Time
Problem,” Kajiya gives a close reading of Greenberg’s writings on Cubism,Cezanne, Abstract Expressionist paintings and others, focusing on his conceptualization of time. He argues that Greenberg, despite his reputation as a formalist, was keenly interested in the conception of time and that his ideas ofinstantaneity and temporality resonated with the concerns of contemporary
artists who were obsessed with time.

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Most of the articles published in the Japanese Journal of American Studies,including those from back issues, are now freely available on the internet(http://www.jaas.gr.jp). We invite responses and criticisms from our readersand hope that the Journal will continue to be an important medium for American
Studies across both disciplinary and national boundaries.

FUMIKO NISHIZAKI
Editor

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 300 words) bymid-January. We are unable to accept the manuscript without
this procedure.
3. The ﬁnal manuscript (maximum 7000 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 forpapers” announcement with exact deadlines and the special
theme for the forthcoming issue.
5. The JAAS will accept inquiries through email:ofﬁce@jaas.gr.jp