The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 18 (2007)

A New Perspective on American History
from the Other Side of the Paciﬁc

Jun FURUYA*

Several years ago, during the so-called La Pietra conference, Tom
Bender asked the non-American participants an interesting question:“How well does American history written by American scholars travelin foreign countries with very different settings from those of the U.S.?”
Bender asked this because he assumed American history was less wellreceived abroad, compared to European history written by European
scholars. Thus the aim of the La Pietra conference was set up “to imagine
American historical narratives that situate the United States more fully
into its larger transnational and intercultural global context, with theintention of revealing more clearly the multiple narratives, time scales,
and geographies, both larger and smaller than formal national boundaries, that constitute the American past.”1
The reasons for the difﬁculty American history as written from a US
perspective faces in foreign countries seem multiple. Among them,American exceptionalism as a historiographical frame is perhaps the single most important factor, for it entrusts a special historical mission only
to the United States and places it in unique historical contexts. As Stanley
Hoffmann points out, any nation tends to insist on its uniqueness, but
only two of them, France and the United States, regard themselves as
exceptional because of their belief in the universality of their values, andonly the United States “has tried to develop foreign policies that reﬂect
Copyright © 2007 Jun Furuya. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission
from the author.
*Professor, University of Tokyo, Japan

59

60

JUN FURUYA

such exceptionalism.”2 Until the end of the Cold War, American exceptionalism had taken one of two forms, that is, either isolationism or crusading interventionism. Both forms held in common the desire to protect
uniquely American (and also universal) values; the difference lay in thestrategies employed. In the post-Cold War, and particularly after 9/11, a
totally new version of American exceptionalism “based almost exclusively on military domination” has been emerging under the sponsorshipof American strategic thinkers and diplomats in the governing circle.3
As long as governing elites use one of these three versions of American
exceptionalism as justiﬁcation for their statecraft and the majority of the
public believes in the elites, historians will always face an uphill struggle to restore sober and judicious histories, de-provincialize American
history, and re-connect it with a history of the larger world. American
historians who disavow American exceptionalism thus have to endureisolation from the general public.
However, these factors inherent in the practice of American history in
the US are not the only reasons that make foreign reception of American
history difﬁcult. Also on the receiving end, many traps usually await US
versions of American history. In Japan’s case, for example, the answer
to Bender’s question is not simple, because the swiftness or smoothness
with which US American history travels to Japan varies greatly depending on its destination in Japanese society. Generally speaking, theJapanese public’s view of America is too opinionated and stereotyped
to allow for a sufﬁciently sophisticated and diversiﬁed understanding ofAmerican history and society. In addition, such an understanding is notnecessary for students and young Japanese in order for them to adopt a
fully “Americanized” way of life. In other words, for these segments ofJapanese society, American history travels far less and far slower than
American fashions and cultural icons, which originate at the center ofAmerican hegemony and easily cross national boundaries.
American history and scholarly American studies of course ﬁnd more
avid recipients among Japanese politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen,
and journalists, who are engaged in ofﬁcial or civilian diplomacy with
America. The view of this audience, however, might be somewhat
biased, since Japan has not had even a single anti-American administration for the past 60 years. Having few serious challengers to American
hegemony, the Japanese government has been a most consistent “inparty” for the American government throughout the post war years. In
general, ofﬁcial and civilian diplomats need some knowledge of

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICAN HISTORY

61

American history so as to understand current American policies andadjust their activities to the rationale given by their American counterparts. For those elites the US is special, if not exceptional, so the idea of
American exceptionalism would ﬁnd a sympathetic reception with them.
They study American history, but do so very selectively. As a result,Japanese diplomacy, again particularly since 9/11, has become so constrained by the binary relationship with the United States that it lacks
international insight, imagination, and creativity. Here the trans-Paciﬁc
perspective almost equates with a bilateral perspective between the US
and Japan.
To return to Bender’s question, history written by Americans travels
very well among Japanese professional historians who engage in research, write, and teach American history in academic institutions. These
historians usually keep in close touch with the state of American historiography, and follow the innovative turns in methodologies imported
from America. They have been very able and quick in absorbing various
historical notions born in the United States such as New Left history,
new social history, the republican synthesis, postmodern, feminist or
postcolonial cultural studies, multiculturalism and identity politics, andrecent whiteness studies. Nonetheless, their impact has been largely
contained to a narrow circle of Americanists and has seldom affected
historians and social scientists working in adjacent ﬁelds, not to speakof politicians or diplomats and the general public. As a result, there is awide gap between professional Americanists and the general public interms of the perception of American life and experience. In Japan, too,historians specializing in American history are relatively isolated fromthe non-academic world. Unfortunately, current American history inJapan has not been able to offer an alternative way of seeing international politics or to suggest another diplomatic course for the nation. In
this regard Japan is not necessarily an exception, for now the practice ofAmerican history and American studies nearly everywhere suffers fromtunnel vision caused by the overwhelming global presence of American
power. Therefore it is time to internationalize American history byadopting truly comparative perspectives.
Overspecialization and the facile acceptance of American historiographical trends have prevented Japanese Americanists from proffering
original innovative interpretations of American history. When John
Higham visited Japan in 1980, he personally deplored the lack ofambitious inventiveness among Japanese Americanists vis-à-vis their

62

JUN FURUYA

counterparts in India.4 It is highly probable that most Indian Americanists
were raised by their country’s elite culture, one formerly immersed in
the British way of seeing the world. They therefore inherently tend to
shed light on American history from not only an Asian point of view,
but also from another internalized, Euro-Asian, point of view. In addition
to what they learn in their training as American specialists, their interpretive framework tends to reﬂect India’s legacy as a former Britishcolony, as well as a nation within Asia. For them, America was and isalways no more, though also no less, than one of the western powers.
This is not the case in Japan. One may well ask why American history
in Japan exists as a fragmented and secluded area of specialization in theJapanese academy. As Bernard Bailyn stresses, “[h]istory should bestudied because it is an absolutely necessary enlargement of human experience, a way of getting out of the boundaries of one’s own life and culture and of seeing more of what human experience has been.”5 If this is
the case, American history in Japan needs to be reoriented in a fundamentally different and innovative way. But before searching for the solution to this problem we need to understand the cause of it.
The limitations concerning the reception of American history in Japan
have a number of reasons, and one may well wish to ponder ﬁrst whether
these limitations stem from problems in the way this history was brought
to or received in Japan. To answer this question we need to return to theoriginal encounter between the two nations.
In the past century and a half Japan has dramatically encountered
America twice: once with the opening of an isolated Tokugawa Japanby the ﬂeet of Commodore Matthew Perry, and a second time in the War
and Occupation led by Douglas A. MacArthur. Dramatic meetings withother cultures are usually thought to engender serious interest and deep
insight in the historical origins of the other culture. In the case of Japan’s
meetings with the United States, however, these meetings were not particularly conducive to promoting a historical understanding of the UnitedStates. Why? Partly because in both nineteenth-century and twentiethcentury encounters with America the Japanese people believed that theUnited States represented an evident and overwhelming military power
without history, and partly because Americans made few efforts to
explain the history of the origins of their power and the reasons why they
were now in Japan. In either case, both sides were too preoccupied withimmediate power relations to concern themselves with history.6

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICAN HISTORY

63

But it was not only American power that overshadowed American history in the Japanese mind. More importantly, Japan’s relative indifference to American history ﬁnds its roots in Japan’s ever-changing viewof the world and of itself. By the time Perry came to Japan in 1853, themost enlightened intellectuals and political leaders in Japan were alreadyaware of China’s tragic encounter with western powers, an encounter
epitomized by the Opium War. For those Japanese leaders, the UnitedStates ﬁrst represented a part of an unfathomable, western and modern
power, invading the east and establishing its colonial rule over one country after another. As a matter of fact, Perry’s ofﬁcial title was “Commander in Chief, United States Naval Forces Stationed in the East India,
China and Japan Seas” and he took the east-bound route to Japan stopping at ports under the aegis of the British Navy.7 Thus, to Japaneseleaders, the United States initially appeared not as a “Paciﬁc” power but
merely as another western power.
The Japanese notion of the coalescence of America with other western
powers, however, did not last long. By the end of the Tokugawa period,
Japanese elites had already recognized the fundamental differences between each western nation-state. And after the Meiji Restoration the newoligarchy began to seek the best model for modernizing its own country.
Although some of the Meiji leaders fervently studied the United States
Constitution by reading The Federalist Papers, they quickly forsook theUnited States as a national model, mainly because they viewed it as arepublic lacking a historical tradition. After all, Meiji Japan was a somewhat schizophrenic nation, vigorously seeking modernization, while atthe same time boastful of its antiquity. As a result, the Imperial Constitution, when it was ﬁnally promulgated, was modeled not after theAmerican one, but rather after the Prussian. The legal system too, wasbased on continental models, and the army and navy adopted Prussianand British forms. The ﬁrst national universities were also establishedbased upon the German model. As a whole, the Japanese governmental
structure ended up European in form.
As Japan created a new nation-state in this manner, it also adopted apeculiar worldview and pecking order among civilizations and nations.
In this imagined world order the United States was seen as a lesser
western power, lesser not because of its lack of power, but because of
its supposed lack of history and culture. This view of America itself originated from Europe.8 Since then, American history has long been studied

64

JUN FURUYA

and taught not as an independent academic subject, but as an auxiliary
part of western history. In other words, Japanese in those years saw
American history not by gazing across the Paciﬁc, but instead by gazing
across the Atlantic through a particularly European lens. Under thisarrangement, American history was introduced into western history in avery inconsistent, almost arbitrary way. Important topics such as settlement, independence, the establishment of the Constitution, western
expansion, the Civil War and the like appeared on occasion around the
periphery of what was taught as “western history.” Haphazardly incorporated into world history, this type of American history lacked any
consistent analytical viewpoint. It did not exhibit any systematic connectedness to the histories of other nations.
Consequently, during the ﬁrst half-century after the inception of modern higher education in Japan, most Japanese universities did not offer
a permanent chair for American history, but instead placed the discipline
in a position under the rubric of Western history. Only in 1925 was theﬁrst chair of American history, funded by an American banker, established at the University of Tokyo.9
Strangely enough however, Meiji Japan sent more students to theUnited States than it did to any European country. This fact did not necessarily contradict the pecking order of nations, for the most elite students and promising young bureaucrats invariably chose Europe as theplace to train and westernize themselves. In contrast, America was thedestination for ambitious, but poorer, non-elite students and impoverished immigrants. In times of political repression it also provided a
refuge for oppositional activists. Ardent Christians and socialists also
numbered among students going to America.
Thus America was accessed in two ways by modern Japan. One way
was the westbound, elite route leading ﬁrst through Europe; the otherwas a non-elite, eastbound route directly over the Paciﬁc. Those who
studied history in Europe and returned home to occupy university chairs
tended naturally to slight American history in their research and teaching. On the other hand, most of those who studied in the United States
tended to be present-minded and engaged in practical and vocational pursuits rather than academic history. This situation adversely affected thedevelopment of academic studies regarding American history in prewar
Japan.10
The Paciﬁc War and subsequent Occupation changed this situation
drastically. This time the US military power came from the southeast,

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICAN HISTORY

65

across the Paciﬁc. In addition, after the defeat, Japan was expelled fromthe East Asian and South East Asian regions and occupied by the US
military. The direction of Japanese international consciousness turned
suddenly to the eastbound route. Once again, as after the opening ofTokugawa Japan, the United States appeared as a great power, but thistime as a power much more self-assertive and formidable than on theﬁrst occasion. Now it was a power that even assumed the role of thesavior of world civilization. There was little room for Japan to choose
how to reconstruct its war-torn country. American ways inundated every
sphere of human activity.
The occupying Allied Powers, led by the Supreme Commander for the
Allied Powers (SCAP) and his General Headquarters (GHQ), launcheda relentless Americanization of Japanese life. The constitution was fundamentally rewritten after the American model. The military was disbanded and the most notorious war leaders purged. The educational
system was reformed under American instruction. Even the family began
to be restructured in a more democratic manner. There was a great inﬂux
of American arts and sciences, not to mention technology. After yearsof strict control over freedom of speech and of the press by the ultranationalist government, the Japanese people coveted and devoured new
information. American English became by far the most dominant second
language in schools. American natural and social sciences poured into
Japanese university curricula and transformed traditional (somewhat
European) scholarship. Had it not been for the memory of Hiroshima andNagasaki, and the Cold War, Japan might have been even more completely Americanized.
Even in this situation, however, American history and American
studies largely failed to make headway in the Japanese academic world.
There were several reasons for this. The US occupation army was at oncea non-self-reﬂective and a forward-looking governing power. The leaders of the GHQ were much less concerned with teaching the historicalorigins of American democracy to Japanese people than with destroying
the remnants of prewar Japan’s peculiar historical understandings inorder to teach them the practical means of democratic government. In
the Japanese academic world during the Occupation period, social sciences such as political science, economics, psychology, and sociology
were considerably Americanized, while history was not. America’s
interest in Japan (and perhaps in the rest of the world as a whole) has
invariably been present-minded and future directed. To Japanese people,

66

JUN FURUYA

most Americans seem to be indifferent not only to other peoples’ history
but also to their own.
Partly because of the occupation policy, but mostly because of internalorganizational inertia, even after the era of reform under the Occupation,
most Japanese universities did not reform the traditional disciplinary
division of history into National, Oriental, and Western compartments.
In addition, from right after the end of WWII to the end of the Cold War,the inﬂuence of Marxism was dominant throughout Japanese academia,
for Marxism as an ideology and as a social scientiﬁc theory provided acomparative and holistic perspective from which to understand modern
Japanese history, the capitalist world, and American power. It affected
not only historians associated with the Japan Communist Party, but also
many progressive historians. For those academic Leftists, the UnitedStates was now the most reactionary imperialist power. In this ideological conﬁguration, American history (in other words, the history of theenemy of the progressive forces) was despised as a ﬁeld ﬁt only for thosewith a bourgeois mentality. For all these reasons it was therefore marginalized within the historical profession once again and continued tooccupy a slightly larger but still modest position in the study of Western
history in general.
This plight of American history and American studies in Japanesehigher education hardly improved in the following years. The late 1950s
witnessed the surge of radical labor movements, the anti-nuclear peace
movement, anti-military-base movements, the student movement, and,most dramatically, the movement against the revision of the US-Japan
Security Treaty. In those movements, the United States became the prime
object of public resentment. During the 1960s and 1970s, the situation
was aggravated by racial violence raging in American cities and theVietnam War, both of which eroded Japanese trust in American freedom
and democracy.
In the late 1980s, this situation eased slowly but surely. Japan’s success in overcoming two oil crises made its people more conﬁdent of theircountry’s status as a competent but friendly rival of American capitalism. While Japan gradually overcame its inferiority complex, the UnitedStates recovered from the nightmare of Vietnam and at last succeededin subduing its prime enemy by winning the Cold War. As both Japanand the United States succeeded in coming to terms with their obsessions, it became possible for historians to better understand American
history. In fact, the period after the late 1980s has witnessed an increase

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICAN HISTORY

67

in the number of students specializing in American history and the steadydevelopment in both the ﬁelds of research and education about American
history.
At this juncture, however, American studies and American history inJapanese education is still racked with traditional difﬁculties. One history teacher explains as follows:
Since the fall of the Berlin wall, education in world history has been changing. More attention is now paid to modern and current history. Asia andAfrica, particularly Southeast Asia and Inland Asia, draw much attention. In
this situation, however, American history is still treated as a part of European
history and America is still regarded simply as one of the advanced countries.
Thus American history does not receive a proper treatment for its reality.

This teacher, however, adds quickly another reason for the distorted
image of American history:
Because the view of American history in high school textbooks was basicallyimported with American democracy after World War II, it inevitably assumes
a happy-ending nature and lacks an analytical edge. As for the Korean and
Vietnam Wars, the description in textbooks is too factual to represent the reasons why the United States became involved in those wars. I suppose that theimportance of the US-Japanese relations no doubt prohibits the authors of
those textbooks from being critical enough to touch on negative aspects ofAmerican history.11

In addition, US-Japanese relations and globalization led by the US,
which created something of an exuberant mood during the 1990s, hascaused another sort of difﬁculty for the Japanese understanding ofAmerican society and particularly its history. One of the most salient
consequences of globalization is the emergence of a common culture
based on a sense of propinquity in relation to the hegemonic nation.
Ironically, some of the most vexing problems in terms of historical
understanding also result from this situation. Particularly in Japan, the“American presence,” which has loomed large during the last half-century, has also contributed to difﬁculties in understanding American history objectively. As pointed out already, American history has long been
disadvantageously treated in the Japanese academy. The scholarly, objective study of America has thus been hindered by a kind of double
obstacle.
What can Americanists in both the United States and Japan do to copewith such tasks as to overcome their isolation from the public in the US

68

JUN FURUYA

and Japan, to restore society’s interest in history, to rectify ethnocentrism in national history, and to de-provincialize and internationalize
national history? To emphasize the transnational aspect of American history does not necessarily mean that the nation has become obsolete as aunit of historical analysis. Rather, “we need a history that understands
national history as itself being made in and by histories that are bothlarger and smaller than the nation’s.”12 If we Japanese Americanists
intend to rethink American history from such a point of view, it seems
sensible to select the Paciﬁc world as a focal point.
But even the path-breaking La Pietra project did not bestow as muchconsideration on the trans-Paciﬁc as on the trans-Atlantic perspective.
That was not without reason, for until very recently the United Statesitself has paid much less attention to the Asian-Paciﬁc region than theEuro-Atlantic region. It was only between the late 70s and early 80s that
the US recognized the People’s Republic of China, the trade dispute withJapan ﬂared up, and Asian NIES (Newly Industrialized Economies)
started growing rapidly with Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines following the suit of the NIES. In 1982, the total amount of US trade with
Asian countries for the ﬁrst time surpassed that with western European
countries. In 1984, the balance of transoceanic commerce tipped in favorof the Paciﬁc at last. US direct investment abroad also increased steadily,
particularly in East Asia, which saw ﬁve-fold growth between 1975 and1995. A burgeoning economy in the region entailed an international
movement of labor, which was accelerated by the enactments of nonracist and less discriminatory immigration laws in the 1960s in the
United States, Canada, and Australia. By the end of the Cold War, thesetransnational movements of people, goods, and capital were conduciveto the rise of a new “Paciﬁc Rim” concept, which would include Asia,
the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Southern Paciﬁc Island countries. Now the US has a vast economic and political stake in the PaciﬁcRim, and Asian and Paciﬁc nations count on an American presence toguarantee the security and prosperity of the region. Against the backdropof these recent developments, it seems judicious to place the US in atrans-Paciﬁc context and consider it a Paciﬁc nation.
However, putting the current international situation aside, it is doubtful whether the US has been a Paciﬁc nation from its inception. Like allother scholarly perspectives, the trans-Paciﬁc perspective in American
history has its own history. The age of a globalized “Paciﬁc Rim” is the
fourth great phase in the history of the relationship between the United

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICAN HISTORY

69

States and the Paciﬁc region. The ﬁrst was the age between the American
Revolution and the Civil War, when the United States as a young republic belatedly joined a Neo-European Paciﬁc world while rapidly expanding westward in the continent. The second was between the 1890s and
WWI, when the US acquired Paciﬁc islands, colonized the Philippines,
and started intervening in Chinese affairs on the basis of the Open Door
principle. The third was the age of the Paciﬁc War and the subsequent
Cold War, when the United States played a hegemonic role in keeping
the security of the entire Paciﬁc region.
It is intriguing to trace American history according to these four phasesof the US as a Paciﬁc nation. It demonstrates quite a distinct view ofAmerican history. Compared with a notion of the US as primarily an
Atlantic nation, this Paciﬁc perspective paints America as invariably
more interventionist. While perhaps less of a crusading or idealistic
force, the US comes to be seen as a commerce-oriented and selﬁsh country simply acting upon its national interests. Already in the ﬁrst years
after the American Revolution, the Paciﬁc engaged American interest
because of the highly proﬁtable fur trade on the Northwest Coast, thenewly discovered whaling industry, and also the opening of commercewith China. At that time the Atlantic Ocean provided America not onlywith lanes for international commerce but also with security against possible intervention by European powers. But the United States became
attracted to the Paciﬁc area based on purely economic and commercial
motives. As the ofﬁcial report of Commodore M. C. Perry’s expedition
to Japan stated, “the Paciﬁc ocean is destined to be the theatre of immensecommercial undertakings,” and America sought commercial intercoursewith Japan out of selﬁsh commercial motives.13 In sum, the US in the
Paciﬁc region rose as just another nakedly imperialistic power. In otherwords, the US has not been very exceptional in this trans-Paciﬁc context.
By taking this perspective, American historians in Japan would havemuch work to do in rectifying American exceptionalism. At the sametime, however, it is important not to ﬂatten the historical difference
between Japanese and American culture. While being conscious about
the difference, we should always reconsider the meaning of “America”
and the signiﬁcance of studying “its history” for the Japanese. The US
and Japan differ fundamentally as modern nation-states: a regime of republicanism vs. the emperor system, diversity vs. homogeneity in termsof population, individualism vs. groupism regarding social ideology,

70

JUN FURUYA

pious monotheism vs. secular polytheism in religious life, etc. Today
anti-American sentiments are rapidly spreading among Japanese people.
One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly the unilateralism of American
diplomacy in recent years. But perhaps an even more fundamental reason is the difference in value systems. It is thus time for JapaneseAmericanists to replace research topics they uncritically borrow from
American colleagues with a broader comparative historical context. Failing to do so, Japanese Americanists will always remain trapped in narrow conﬁnes, whether they wish to be or not.
At the same time we should ask US historians in America to place
their work in as international a context as possible. For outsiders,American power always appears devoid of history. This phenomenon
itself is an interesting subject of American studies. But I suppose that
US historians in America are at least in part responsible for that. During
the OAH meeting several years ago, the theme of which was, I believe,
the internationalizing of American history, I had a very interesting
experience in a session entitled, “McCarthyism at Home and Abroad.”In this session no speaker, commentator, or moderator referred to
McCarthyism’s impact on postwar Asia, while all of them talked about
its impact on Euro-American relations. So from the ﬂoor I made a shortcomment about the general indifference of those historians to the question of how McCarthyism changed the US occupation policy in Japanand also Japan’s internal politics after the 1950s. One of the speaker’s
answers was intriguing, for he implied that studying the US State
Department was enough to understand the impact of McCarthyism on
Japanese politics and on occupation policy: “But we have much studied
the State Department.” I hope his attitude is an isolated exception. But
if not, we should ask American Americanists to be slightly more sympathetic to the peculiar contexts in which other countries’ Americanists
become interested in the subjects and works of American history. I
believe that this will make history written by American Americanists a
little easier to accept abroad.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICAN HISTORY

71

NOTES
1

Thomas Bender, “Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History,”
post-conference report for Conference III, Villa La Pietra, New York University in
Florence, Italy, 5–8 July 1999, 2–3.
2
Stanley Hoffmann, “American Exceptionalism: The New Version,” in American
Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 225.
3
Ibid, 228.
4
John Higham, personal interview by author.
5
Bernard Bailyn, On the Teaching and Writing of History, (Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England), 12.
6
William L. Neumann, America Encounters Japan: From Perry to MacArthur,(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), chaps. 4, 13, 14.
7
Yasunobu Soumura, Peri ha naze nihon ni kitaka [Why did Perry come to Japan?](Tokyo: Shincho sha, 1987), 147–70.
8
By the 1890s, the discipline of history in Japanese universities was divided “intonational history (Japan), Eastern history (Asia without Japan), and Western history (primarily Europe).” Eastern (or Oriental) and Western history were coupled to form “world
history.” See Carol Gluck, “House of Mirrors: American History-Writing on Japan,” inImagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, eds. Anthony Molho andGordon S. Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 436.
9
Makoto Saito, “Nihon no amerika kenkyu zenshi” [Japanese American-studies at
its inception], in Amerika kenkyu an’nai [An Introduction to American Studies], 257–59.
10
Ibid., 256; Jun Furuya, “Graduate Student and Quaker,” in Nitobe Inazo: Japan’s
Bridge Across the Paciﬁc, ed. John F. Howes (Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, 1995),
55–76; idem, “Showa zenki ni okeru ‘amerika kennkoku no rinen’ zo” [The image of
the “founding ideals of the United States” in early Showa Era], in Amerika kennkoku norinenn to nichi-bei kankei [The founding ideals of the United States and U.S.-Japan relations] (Tokyo: NIRA Research Report No. 940051), 113–30.
11International House of Japan, American Studies Curriculum in Higher Education(Tokyo: International House of Japan, 1997), 121.
12
Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History, (NewYork: Hill and Wang, 2006), 3.
13
Francis L. Hawks, comp., Narrative of the Expedition of An American Squadron to
the China Seas and Japan, Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854 under theCommand of Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy, (Washington, D.C.: Beverley
Tucker, Senate Printer, 1956), 62, 73.