NANZAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES Volume 38 (2016): 41-48
From Dependency to Collaboration toward a More Global
Society: The Struggles of Japanese Researchers in the
Field of American Studies, from Pre-WWII to the Present
KAWASHIMA Masaki
*Introduction: The Four Turning Points of American Studies in Japan
I would like to thank everyone here very much for coming to Nanzan University. I feel honored to declare the opening of the 40th Anniversary symposium of the Center for American Studies of Nanzan University. My talk begins with the following questions: What were the original aims of the Japanese Americanists (researchers in the field of American studies) in the prewar era? What changes did they experience from the postwar era to the present? What are their current and future goals?
There were four turning points for Japanese Americanists. The first was in 1941 and compelled a drastic change from the militaristic research toward the establishment of Asian Monroeism in the prewar era, to the beginning of the dependency on the United States for the model for the democratization and economic development of postwar Japan. The second came in the 1960s, and this was the beginning of the struggle for Japanese researchers to free themselves from the dependency on the United States academically as well as politically in the midst of rising anti-American feeling. The third turning point came in 1991, and this marked the beginning of the new era from the end of the Cold War to 2015. The fourth and the latest turning point came last year, in 2015, when the Japanese government fundamentally changed its interpretation of Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan, which was said to be “made in the USA” and “imposed” on Japan just after the unconditional surrender to the U.S. armed forces. The latest * The author received his Lit. D. in modern and contemporary history at Kyoto University. He is currently the director of the Center for American Studies and a professor of the Faculty of Foreign Studies, at Nanzan University. He organized the Symposium for the 40th Anniversary of the Center for American Studies, entitled, “American Studies in Japan: Its History, Present Situation, and Future Course” held at Nanzan University on July 2, 2016. This article is the opening remarks presented by the author at the above-mentioned symposium. The author would like to express his deepest appreciation for the useful comments from Professors Thomas J. Sugrue and Maekawa Reiko. His appreciation also goes to the symposium participants.
turning point confronts Japanese Americanists with the following two realities: less dependency on U.S. military power against China and North Korea, and an ever-increasing necessity to build new academic cooperation between researchers from the two countries and probably more countries including China, Korea and other Asian Pacific countries for a more global society.
I would like to talk about the above-mentioned points by focusing on the history of the American Studies Summer Seminars in postwar Japan.
I．Two Currents of the Prewar Period (the 1920s to the 1930s)
The first turning point came on Sunday, December 7, 1941, in Honolulu. At that time, the GNP of the United States was 11.8 times greater than that of Japan. Didn’t Japanese Americanists at that time understand the overwhelming difference in power between the U.S. and Japan before the Pearl Harbor attack? My answer is “no.” Why did they support to make war then? It was because the prewar Japanese Americanists harbored a fatal prejudice. In prewar Japan there were two currents in American studies: one formal, the other popular. Here I shall explain what I mean by these terms.
The formal Japanese government interests in the United States, especially among the pro-British and American diplomats, increased during the Taisho Democracy Movement, which resembled the Progressive Movement in the United States. Beard Charles A., one of the leading progressive historians in the United States, came to Tokyo in 1923 and gave advice on how to rebuild Tokyo just after the big earthquake had occurred. In the same year, a new course was started at the University of Tokyo through a donation from Hepburn A. Barton, a banker from New York. Takagi Yasaka was the first Hepburn Professor of American Constitution, History, and Diplomacy, and he began teaching in the following year. Many of his students became diplomats and reinforced the pro-Britain and America trend in diplomacy throughout the 1920s. The Japanese government had already concluded the Nine-Power Treaty in 1922 to limit Japanese naval power and affirm the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China. When the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, the first anti-war treaty, was established by the U.S. Secretary of State and the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Japan was one of the first 15 countries to declare the renunciation of war as a means to solve international disputes. This was why Japan could not formally declare war against China in the 1930s.
The other, rather informal current of American studies in Japan had something to do with Baron Makino Nobuaki’s proposal for an agreement to abolish racial discrimination at the Paris Peace Conference after the Great World War. Although unsuccessful, it increased support for Japan among the African American community and stimulated Japanese interest in African Americans. In particular, it was the prewar Japanese Pan-Asianistic nationalists who took a special interest
in African American nationalist movements. Rising anti-American feeling in Japan after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 fueled this trend. Among others, I would like to emphasize Mitsukawa Kametaro, a right-wing nationalist, who attempted to contact Garvey Marcus, a leading post-WWI Black nationalist. The FBI kept an eye on Mitsukawa and other Japanese activists, especially those in the United States who were suspected of being spies and who intended to stimulate anti-white feeling among African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s. Some competent military cadets continued to choose the United States as the place where they conducted on-the-ground research. For instance, Yamamoto Isoroku, the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet during World War II; Kuribayashi Tadamichi, the commander of the Japanese garrison during the Battle of Iwo Jima; and Yahara Hiromichi, the senior staff officer in charge of operations for the 32nd Japanese Army on Okinawa during the American invasion.
In summary, just prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, there was a bias among the U.S. watchers in Japan who were inclined to put too much emphasis on racial and ethnic disunion and Eibei kabun ron (the theory that the alliance between the U.K. and the U.S. was fragile), which led Japan to make a fatal gamble.
II．The Postwar Period (1945―1960)
The unconditional surrender to the United States on August 15, 1945, compelled the Japanese Americanists and pro-British and American diplomats to do some soul-searching. Two years later, the first Japanese Association for American Studies was established by 25 researchers. The seven-volume series
Genten Amerika-shi (A compilation of original documents of American history)
began to be published the following year, and this was highly evaluated in U.S. academia as the dawn of American studies and as an interdisciplinary academic field.
The first task of postwar Americanists in Japan meant catching up to academia in the United States. Most remarkable was the import of academic trends from the United States, especially the start of the American Studies Summer Seminars and the second and current JAAS (Japanese Association for American Studies) in the mid―1950s.
The origin of the American Studies Summer Seminars was the Joint Seminars of the University of Tokyo and Stanford University from 1950 to 1956. There was also a seminar held in Nagano Prefecture in 1955. A full-scale movement began with the first Kyoto American Studies Summer Seminars (KASSS) from 1951 to 1987. The KASSS was first held by Kyoto University and soon the baton was handed over to Doshisha University. The early Summer Seminar movement was successful in attracting young, competent researchers, and the main reason for this was its distinguished guests such as Woodward C. Vann and Faulkner William. The reestablishment of the JAAS and the beginning of the Summer Seminar
movement in the 1950s not only developed the field of American studies in Japan but also deepened the dependency on American public diplomacy during the Cold War. At the same time, it should be remembered that the KASSS sponsored by Doshisha University contributed much to the development of American studies in Japan mainly because of having everyone lodge together for two weeks. This enhanced a mental togetherness and a common sense of mission for a future global society among both the young Japanese researchers and the American big-name guest scholars, including liberal/radical historians such as Edmund S. Morgan and Herbert G. Gutman.
III．From the 1960s through the 1980s (1960―1990)
The second turning point came in 1960 with the revision of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, to which most Japanese people were opposed because this revision might cause Japan to be involved in American wars in Asia. Japanese anti-American feeling came to a head when a female student from the University of Tokyo was killed in front of the Diet building by riot police while participating in the anti-treaty demonstration. After the Vietnam War became an American war in 1964, anti-American feeling in Japan increased dramatically.
Anti-American feeling increased throughout the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, however, a kind of pro-American mood also began to spread among some radicalized Japanese students influenced by “new left” historians, who began to appear on the scene in response to the rising Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States in the 1960s. I personally was strongly influenced by Shimada Masugi, one of the above-mentioned Japanese Americanists, who was then an assistant professor and is now an emeritus professor of Kyoto University. As a result of this generational change, the Sapporo Cool Seminars for American Studies (SCSAS) began in 1980 and continued until 1995. About one hundred young researchers gathered every year and contributed to the professional discussions between Japanese and American researchers in search of an equal basis beyond a teach-and-learn situation.
Just one year later I entered Kyoto University, then the Vietnam War ended in 1975, and the decline of American hegemony was obvious in the 1980s. Before long, “Japan as Number One” became the popular catchphrase of the time. The fact that left-wing researchers, including Immanuel Wallerstein, accepted this positively shows how deep the impact of the Vietnam War had been on U.S. academia. The result was an increase in Japan bashing under the Reagan administration. So-called Japan problems included cultural peculiarities such as overwork and the isolationist behavior of Japanese corporations. On the other hand, the close relation between “Ron-Yasu,” referring to President Reagan Ronald and Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, resulted in closer military ties between the two countries. Nakasone declared that Japan should be the
unsinkable aircraft carrier for the U.S. armed forces against the Communists. The so-called Sympathy Budget for the U.S. military forces stationed in Japan began in the late 1970s and increased in the 1980s and 1990s, rising dramatically from 6.2 billion yen in 1978 to 189.9 billion yen in 2015. Mr. Trump may save this situation by pulling the U.S. military forces out of Japan. At any rate, America has been losing its attractiveness as the model for Japanese people to emulate since 1975, when I began to think of majoring in American history under the late Professor Imazu Akira, a pioneer of American studies at Kyoto University. The reason I chose American history as my major was because I liked Imazu sensei’s personality and I loved listening to and playing Bluegrass music. My favorite players were Doc Watson, a distinguished guitarist, and Duffy John, the splendid mandolin picker of the Country Gentlemen.
IV．Since the End of the Cold War (1991―2015)
The third turning point came in the early 1990s. The end of the Cold War in December 1991 coincided with the end of Apartheid in the Republic of South Africa. This overlap enhanced our expectations for the future course of world affairs. But history does not end, and the leading LDP (Liberal Democratic Party of Japan) politicians began to worry about the drifting Japan-U.S. alliance. While LDP politicians dramatically increased the Sympathy Budget, Japanese Americanists began to look for renewed meaning in U.S.-Japan academic relations. Their first activity was the KASSS, the second Kyoto American Studies Summer Seminars of 1996―2005, sponsored by Ritsumeikan University, in which the discussions of researchers from Japan, the United States, and other countries from the Asia Pacific Region were dramatically refined and developed. This was a new style that had been established in Sapporo. As I myself participated in the KASSS twice as a presenter, I realized how important English proficiency is for Japanese Americanists if they are to be good researchers in a rapidly globalizing academic community.
Our Center for American Studies succeeded KASSS and began the five-year project of the Nagoya American Studies Summer Seminars (NASSS) that lasted from 2007 to 2011. The NASSS’s most remarkable selling point was the International Graduate Student Seminar (IGSS), an additional event to the main conference. About 200 graduate students from Japan and other Asian Pacific countries participated in the IGSS over the course of five years. They had discussions all night with the American scholars after eating together. We also attempted a new pre-event for the local community in the form of an open-to-the-public seminar on the presidential election. We provided local citizens who were interested in American studies with simultaneous interpreters. All of this required a vast budget, and our total budget for the five years came to about 75 million yen, including 7.8 million yen donated by companies such as Toyota and Japan
Railroad. I did this fund-raising work almost every day for two years and I was exhausted. I handed over the baton to my colleagues here, Professors Fujimoto and Yamagishi, in the fall of 2009. I was very pleased and honored that this trial, especially the concept of the IGSS, was succeeded by Doshisha American Studies Summer Seminars from 2012 to 2014, and has been held at Sophia University since 2015. I would like to repeat the core concept of the IGSS: a cooperative effort to establish a set of basic ethics and values for a future global society. Last year, the Abe administration decided to change its interpretation of Article 9 of the Constitution to prepare for a possible military clash with neighboring countries over territorial and nuclear issues. What concerns Prime Minister Abe most is China as the hegemonic power in this region. His answer to this situation is to strengthen the alliance between the U.S. and Japan. It seems to me our prime minister is seeking a dependency on U.S. military power that is shrewder than that of his grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke and his predecessor, Yoshida Shigeru. Although Abe will not openly discuss this, this issue is the main theme of the current national election campaign of the House of Councilors in Japan.
What should we do? By “we,” I mean American studies researchers on both sides of the Pacific. Since the end of the Cold War, the position of Japan has decreased its importance to the United States to be compared to that of China. It is obvious that the U.S. government was determined to end public diplomacy at least in Japan. In the meantime, the Confucius Institutes began to be established in Japan and elsewhere in the world by the Chinese government.
Conclusion: Confronted with Two Options
In conclusion, I would like to state that the U.S. society continues to be the example for Japanese society in the near future, for better or worse. With China’s remarkable ascendancy, Japanese Americanists expect the United States to give some sort of alternative so that people the world over, including the Chinese, can believe that we should choose nothing but democracy as the basic common rule because history tells us that our world is too complicated to be governed by a single dictator or a closed group of people, regardless of how competent they may be.
The desire of the Japanese political establishment is clear, no matter how much they try to conceal it. That is to create a much shrewder dependency on the United States than the Yoshida administration managed. I am afraid that our American counterparts may be much smarter and possess more powerful resources.
Americanists on both sides of the Pacific need to build an alternative alliance from the ground up, one that is based on honesty and an equal partnership.
In conclusion, let me repeat the importance for Japanese Americanists to communicate in English to the world. Don’t be too overly worried about your
English proficiency. What is important is the content of what you want to say to people. Thank you very much for listening.
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