The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 33 (2022)

Editor’s Introduction

Mobility has been regarded as one of the major elements in American
life. Archetypal cases readily come to mind, such as geographic mobilityof white settlers across the continent from east to west, and upward social
mobility in cities of lower-class people, often immigrants from abroad.
In either formulation, mobility is life-changing: it is associated with themoving person’s commitment to achieve an improved socioeconomic
standing, which in turn opens doors to broader recognition and even renown
if the person successfully makes the move all the way. Considered thisway, mobility evokes an optimistic, forward-looking approach to life andreinforces the popular creed about what is possible for one in one’s own
life. This positive understanding of mobility renders immobility hardly
inspiring—it suggests shortage or lack of opportunity, resources, and worstof all, initiative.
Readers of this journal must have sensed by now that the previous
paragraph describes mobility in American life along “nationalist”
lines—mobility which supposedly encourages individualist actions andyet serves to unify the American people by holding out the promise of thefruits of successful moving. The organizing idea of Number Thirty-Threeof the Japanese Journal of American Studies, however, is that besides
the traditional approach there are many other scholarly treatments inwhich attention to mobility is helpful. This issue accordingly features six
contributions which address a variety of questions bearing on mobility
expansively. Some offer critical appraisals of the concept of mobility
by probing different implications associated with it. Some others apply
the term to phenomena other than shifts in the geographic location orsocioeconomic standing of people, thereby introducing new angles to offer
insights in the shifting dynamics of American society and culture. Stillothers employ transnational approaches, as mobility can be practiced acrossnational boundaries.
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The special feature opens with literary studies. Takahiro Sakane zeroes inon Henry James’s sense of revolt against the relentless, or mobile, change inthe urban landscape, architecture and demography in America at the turn of
the twentieth century. In The American Scene, James evokes an alternativevision to extol the past representing an immobile, enduring value worth
commemorating, even as his prose shows signs of irrepressible fluidity
in his perception. In the second contribution which focuses on African
Americans in Harlem in the early twentieth century, Yuri Sakuma showsthat there were three aesthetic positions in the writings produced during
the Harlem Renaissance on the themes of migration, blues and jazz: racial
uplift, appreciation of primal vitality of the southern and working-classorigins, and the objectification of females and feminist resistance to it. The
third contribution, by Manako Ogawa, discusses an episode in the historyof the transplantation in Hawai‛i of Kotohira Shrine, the guarding deity ofhighly mobile Japanese fisherfolk, in the late 1940s. The US government
confiscated the shrine in 1948 as enemy assets, only to lose in the courtcase filed against it by the members of the shrine. It assumed that all shrines
contributed to State Shinto and therefore the emperor worship of the 1930s
and 1940s but failed to produce evidence in its favor, and the decisionvindicated the shrine’s roots in the migratory fishing community.
A perspective from those who encouraged mobility is provided in thefourth contribution. Focusing on boosters who were intent on securing
major federal matching grants for a planned rapid transit system fromAtlanta to its suburbs in the 1950s and early 1960s, Ichiro Miyata shows
which obstacles to facilitation of mobility the boosters took pains to
overcome and which ones they failed to face squarely, particularly the thenin-process white flight. In the fifth contribution, Yuka Mizutani explicates
how the Arizona-Sonora area is distinct from adjacent borderlands. TheArizona-Sonora borderland is very much centered in the harsh environmentof the Sonoran Desert, and its edible plants deeply inform the food cultureof the area. Diverse population groups, from Indigenous peoples tolatecomers who moved in the area from late nineteenth century on, haveadded new layers to the distinctive regional gastronomy which is clearlymarked off from commercialized Tex-Mex food. In the sixth contribution,
Masahito Watanabe discusses how the caucus system adopted in the stateof Iowa for the selection of presidential candidates encourages broad
participation in the electoral campaign process. Despite the criticisms
triggered in 2020 by the delay in reporting the results of the caucuses,
Watanabe argues that Iowa’s system has its virtues and has worked

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reasonably well. The rules of Iowa caucuses allow formation of alliancesamong groups of supporters of presidential aspirants or of particular issues.
Such alliances have been successful in foregrounding seemingly uninviting
political questions as rousing campaign issues, and have helped revitalizepresidential campaigns in the present century.
This issue also publishes two articles on Herman Melville. Yoshiaki
Furui compares and connects Typee, Melville’s first major novel, with
better-known Moby Dick by focusing on treatments of alterity. Despite
all the great differences between the two works, both share an attention
to seeing through the unfathomable other. Captain Ahab is insistent on
sizing up the white whale and is forthright in confronting it; Tommo istitillated by the culture of the Typees, though he is fearful and stops short ofimmersing himself in it. In the last article of this volume Shogo Tanokuchi
delves among Melville’s short, comical essays and identifies a complicatedfluctuation of perspective on Chinese and Japanese civilizations in theshadow of US expansion across the continent and the Pacific. Rather thanputting the narrators in the privileged position of the observer of Asian
cultures as in his more famous longer works, Melville’s short essays
resonate with P. T. Barnum’s then-popular freaky exhibitions in theiroccasional inversion of the observer and the observed.
We thank Katy Meigs for her careful attention to the articles ascopyeditor and Maki Tsunoda for her administrative support. David Potter
has our gratitude for his timely assistance to the editorial board. We also
thank the American Studies Foundation for its generous financial support
which has made possible the publication of this volume. The articles
published in the Japanese Journal of American Studies, including thosefrom back issues, are freely available online (http://www.jaas.gr.jp). We
invite responses and criticisms from our readers and hope that the journal
will continue to be an important player in the field of American Studies.
KENRYU HASHIKAWAEditor