Story Time

In Japan, onechan never really needed or wanted bed-time stories. Sure, she'd have her mom read her books from the library as often as she could get her to, she'd ask me to read her the few books in English we brought from home, and when she was really desperate would get me to read to her in Japanese. But now that we're back in the States, she's really wanted to get back into the bed-time rituals we had established before we left. With some changes.

For one thing, she definitely likes certain stories for their nostalgia value now. Big Sister Dora is a big hit with her, probably because it takes her back to the winter and spring before imoto was born when we were frankly trying to indoctrinate train prepare her for her changing role in the family. Some stories take her even further back in time, like Goodnight Moon and Pat the Bunny (bed time edition). In Japanese, she's gotten even more into this series of stories about two little bear friends, Guri to Gura, which we originally received as a gift from the wife of one of my colleagues and which we now have access to thanks to the library at onechan's UB yochien. Since it's going to take her awhile to figure out how to invent that time machine she's been implicitly asking for lately, narrative will have to do for the time being.

For another, she's into me making up stories at bed time for the first time. These characters I invented several trips ago in Japan based on her and her oldest Japanese cousin, whom I'll call Iki and Ika here, are now doing double duty here. In the past, I told mostly action-adventure or silly stories about Iki and Ika's interactions with her favorite cartoon characters like Dora and the various Pretty Cure superheroes. Now, taking a page from Bill Benzon's Sparkychan and Gojochan, I'm having Iki and Ika go through versions of the problems onechan is going through. So one story has had them discussing how to make new friends in a new place. Another has had them figuring out what to do when a kid at hoikuen is being mean to them.

All this has gotten me thinking about imoto. It's clear that onechan is motivated to develop her English through listening to these stories. But in part because imoto is too young to really understand the shift from a Japanese-saturated environment to an English-saturated one and in part because she's been on this physical rather than verbal kick ever since she figured out how to roll over, I'm not at all confident that she's going to get the idea of using (more) words any time soon. So figuring out how to change her bed-time ritual to get some story time into it is going to be a big deal in the next several months. The problem is that she's so used to going to sleep with her mom in one bed and onechan is so used to going to sleep a little later with me in a different bed (after staggered baths most of the time) that it's going to be difficult to change things around so that I'm reading imoto a story in English before she goes to sleep with her mom. I can see adding a post-bath step, where the tsuma reads to onechan in Japanese while I read to imoto in English and then reversing it to end up with the familiar pre-sleep situation. Shouldn't be too big of a change, given that the current pattern fell into place only in the last two weeks, when it became clear to onechan that imoto is such a bed-hog that it's really difficult for all four of us to sleep together comfortably. But it does mean adding another 10-20 minutes to the process of putting the girls (and, usually, ourselves) down for the night (or in our case, a few hours before heading downstairs to talk and work for a while and then back upstairs to sneak a few hours of sleep together with imoto). Still, imoto's getting close to the age when we started building in regular bed-time storytelling to onechan's good night ritual, so it's going to have to happen sooner or later....

[Update (9/16/07): Thanks to Uncle Bill Benzon, I can point you toward this new University of Waterloo psychology study on very young children and stories!]

Abe Out

Back in the day, I did a number of political posts at Mostly Harmless that looked critically at the ties between right wingers in the U.S. and Japan. (Yes, March feels like "back in the day.")

I never came out with a prediction that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would resign, like I did for then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (ok, so I was off by a few months there--sue me!), and now I'm wishing I did, because he just did!

Now I'm wondering which party is in more trouble, Japan's LDP or the U.S.'s Republican Party? Given that the Republicans have already lost both legislative houses and neither Cheney nor Bush has offered to step down, I'd have to say it's the LDP. But there's still time for the Republicans to catch up with the LDP. Go for it, y'all!

Early Semester Rush Over?

So far this semester, the chair and I have hired two new TAs after a pair of returning ones got job offers elsewhere the week before classes started, run our first department meeting, gotten the wording on our two upcoming tenure-track searches approved and sent out to MLA, gotten all the department committees set up, gotten the Spring 2008 schedule out for administrative approval, hired a Visiting Assistant Professor for the spring, and begun mentoring our three new tenure-track hires. And that's just the stuff I remember. Next week: getting together a committee to evaluate everyone's cases for a discretionary salary increase (it has to be made up of people not going for this "extra" raise). Bright side: we checked with the dean and reread the department handbook and it appears I'll be eligible to apply this year, despite being away on leave last year. Other good news: next semester I get to teach two courses I've been waiting my entire time here to get a shot at: Black Women Writers and Non-Western Literature. OK, time to finally finish the minutes from that department meeting!

Fantasy Bleg

So I'm doing one of my favorite things this year, which is mentoring an honors thesis on a topic I'd be focusing on if I were starting over as an undergrad doing an honors thesis right about now. No, it's not science fiction, comics, or video games, but fantasy. The student is interested in the ranges of the rules and functions of magic in fantasy, figuring that it may not be that dissimilar to the rules and functions of (new) technology in science fiction. The larger project is to make a case for the scholarly study of fantasy.

Not only does this give me a chance to introduce her to some of my favorite writers--Steven Brust, Neil Gaiman, Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles de Lint, and Sherri Tepper--as well as others I respect but don't like as much yet should be crucial to her project--Piers Anthony, Lloyd Alexander, Ursula Le Guin, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and of course J.R.R. Tolkien. But, most important, I get to read some George R.R. Martin and Irene Radford--not to mention finally finish the last three books of the Harry Potter series! What's more, this is work, or should I say guilt-free pleasure?

So, keeping the former part of the last sentence in mind, is anyone out there aware of good scholarly studies of fantasy? Lucie Armitt's Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction is our entry point, but she's a bit too hung up on the fantastic and the possibilities of Lit-ah-rary fantasy, for my taste at least.

Saturday School Then and Now

Just like my little brother and I did, my two daughters go to Saturday school. Just as my parents drove us to New Hartford for Hebrew school, the tsuma and I drive onechan and imoto to Buffalo for yochien. I wonder if the resemblances will end there.

My parents both grew up in heavily Jewish communities in post-W.W.-II era Brooklyn and, later, Long Island. My brother and I grew up as two of the four Jewish kids in Clinton, NY. So we went, rather unwillingly, to Hebrew school, until we had our Bar Mitzvahs--and then stopped. We were only taught enough Hebrew to make it through our Torah readings--and that's about as much as we learned. We identified as upstate New Yorkers, not as Jewish Americans.

Onechan and imoto have dual Japanese and U.S. citizenship. The tsuma and I hope their year in Japan came at just the right time, linguistically speaking, and that Saturday yochien in Buffalo can tide them over until we get back for our next extended stay. From what I've seen of the teachers and the set-up, they have decent odds at keeping connected with Japanese language and culture. Onechan is already loving to learn the hiragana and katakana writing systems that I struggled over last fall. She was "drawing words," as she put it to me later, for an hour straight last week. She seems to really like her sensei, too. But as good as they are, what's really going to keep her Japanese developing is her peer group there--and so far, only she and a 6-year-old girl whose Japanese is far behind her are the only ones in the class. We've heard two more kids might join up this week, so we'll see tomorrow. Her Fukuoka yochien friends and her cousins in Okinawa are mostly too young right now to enjoy talking on the phone with her (that is, over Skype), so she's going to have to rely on her Buffalo yochien friends until imoto gets old enough to start having conversations in Japanese with her.

So both girls are light years ahead of where my brother and I were at their ages. Perhaps if my grandparents had tried to pass down Yiddish, we could have become bilingual at a young age, too. But it's clear that they wanted their children to be monolingual in English. When my dad's mom was in late stages of Alzheimer's, a long time ago now, there was a period when she was mostly living in her memories of the Depression era. She would often correct our English when we visited her and our grandfather in Long Island, particularly irritated by my brother's and my upstate accents and bad pronunciation/enunciation according to her standards of correct English (which were quite correct). Although she spoke Yiddish with her sister and her husband her whole life, she didn't try to teach more than a word here or there to her grandchildren.

That's history for you. Our grandparents came to America just before anti-immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment peaked with the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act--a time when the KKK was reviving, when nativism and 100%-Americanism set the standards of inclusion and exclusion, when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were of ambiguous and uncertain racial status (not-quite-white, at best). Our parents were born at a time when the U.S. racial order was undergoing a historic shift, one that has proven to be more deeply-rooted and extensive than the unfinished revolution of the later civil rights movement: the opening-up of whiteness to the previously racialized immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century, first on a kind of conditional "white ethnic" status and later simply white. Perhaps if we had grown up downstate, my brother and I would have taken part in the "ethnic revivals" of the 1970s, but most likely not. Between our grandfather's Holocaust-induced disbelief and our father's profession of philosophy (not to mention our childhoods in the college towns of Clinton, Chapel Hill, and Palo Alto), it's difficult to imagine us being seriously attracted to Judaism or Jewish culture.

So do our stories fulfill the classic melting pot script? With my brother marrying into a big Polish Catholic family and their four kids growing up in the classic suburban mode, perhaps so. Or maybe the ethnic similarities (we're part Polish and part Hungarian) outweigh the religious differences there, so that onechan's and imoto's cousins' childhoods will echo their grandparents' somewhat. In any case, it's pretty clear that onechan's and imoto's childhoods will be something different. In what ways and with what effects remains to be seen.

Deer in the Headlights

That's what I've felt like during my many hours in the office the past week and a half. There are a lot of benefits to being associate chair--a course release each semester, a small stipend (even smaller for me since I'm only doing it for the fall), a get-out-of-other-departmental-committee-work-free card), and let's not forget the soul-corrupting power (bwaa ha ha!)--but parking your computer and a few books in one of the rooms in the departmental office complex is most definitely not one of them.

Back in Fukuoka, my office time was my own. Even though I invited students to visit me every class, I didn't have to post any office hours, most of my students were loath to visit another campus (or university), and my 21st Century Program students were hesitant to intrude on me. Not so in Fredonia. Even though I've kept my office hours to a minimum for me (an hour and a half a day for the first four days of the week), I'm actually spending closer to 12-16 hours a week in that room, for the first month of the semester at least. There's just too much that needs to get done--new faculty need mentoring, advisees need advice, internship seekers need coordinating, students appealing various things need to be heard out and referred to the appropriate people, the spring 2008 schedule needs to be compiled, job ad language needs to be approved, committees need to be formed, minutes for the first department meeting need to be typed up, a colleague's teaching evaluations from last semester need to be summarized, a new dean needs to be consulted, and e-correspondence needs to be maintained. And that's just for starters. Between the departmental secretary and the chair, very little of this is my responsibility alone, but I have my hand in to a greater or lesser degree on just about all of it. The upshot is, very little time is left over for, say, getting my course web pages in shape, learning my students' names, tweaking my lesson plans, getting some reading for my courses in, or surfing the MLA bibliography. You know, the kinds of things I use my time in the office for when I'm not associate chair. It's gotten so bad at times the past two weeks I've found myself bouncing from task to task without finishing any of them. And when I actually get a chance to focus on, say, my own teaching, well, my focus is shot.

I know this, too, will pass, and I'll someday figure out how to be more efficient in the office at Fredonia--just as I eventually adjusted to my commute in Fukuoka and became a champion subway reader. But I'll tell you: a year away from service of any kind sure leaves you rusty. And wondering how you did so much more of it before your leave....

Third Try's the Charm?

I'm teaching my Postcolonial Hawthorne course for the third time this semester--first was at Kyushu University in Fall 2006, next at Seinan Gakuin University in Spring 2007, and now here. Those already interested in the intricacies of course design may find the differences between the first two and the last less boring than the vast majority of those whose lives will never be brightened by this post.

Apparently I was the last in my department to get the memo that postcolonial theory is dead. But that PMLA forum I missed in May will actually be perfect for the course, the basic goal of which remains to ask whether Hawthorne ought to be considered a postcolonial writer or not and why, with a particular focus on the implications and stakes of the answers to these questions.

On Growing Up Too Fast

Onechan's been saying some things since we moved away from Fukuoka that are really heart-breaking. Here are a few:

• "I want to be a baby again."
  
• "I miss my friends at the yochien."
  
• "I miss my friends at Chiba."
  
• "I miss my friends at [her old day care place in Fredonia]." [This after realizing that yesterday was her last day there--next Tuesday she starts at the university children's center we're calling her hoikuen to link it to and distinguish it from her yochien.]
  
• "I want an onechan. A big girl." [This after playing with an 8-year-old all day yesterday and a 5-going-on-6-year-old half the day today.]
  

These aren't so bad on their own, but in context, they are. I'm not just talking body language and tone of voice. I'm talking about the kind of reception onechan and the tsuma have been getting when they primarily use Japanese out in public here in western NY. (I guess imoto would be getting it, too, if she used more than two words regularly.) Let's just say that they've already gotten more nasty looks and cold shoulders in just over two weeks here than I got the entire year using English in public anywhere in Japan. It would be bad enough on its own, but onechan is old enough to notice it.

Fortunately, it hasn't been all bad. Reuniting with her friends has been great, if awkward at first. With her best friend, onechan slipped into her Fukuoka friendship mode, chattering away in Japanese almost continuously while role-playing various games. In a larger group of old and new faculty kid friends, she went back to her mode on the first few weeks of yochien--quiet observation, tagging along, imitating what the kids were doing, and eventually loosening up.

And it's not like it's not going to get better quickly. Her Fredonia hoikuen is set up remarkably similarly to her Fukuoka yochien, and she started playing with the kids in her room right away when we visited it last week. She's been speaking English her whole life, unlike Japanese, which she's really only started speaking seriously with people other than her mom since January, so it shouldn't take her long to be able to express herself as well in English as Japanese. Her Buffalo hoikuen every Saturday will at least get her speaking and learning Japanese on a regular basis, not to mention interacting with Japanese and Japanese-American kids. And the tsuma and I are doing everything we can to help her stay bilingual, have lots of play time her friends in Fredonia on Sundays, and learn to deal with the eyes on her when she speaks Japanese in public.

But still, it's a complicated homecoming--and worse, onechan is starting to notice the complications. It had to happen eventually, but a part of me was hoping it would come much much later. Staying up worrying about it isn't going to make it any better, so time to sign off. (But I can't help noticing that the day care costs for both girls going twice a week here in western NY are roughly twice what they were in Fukuoka for onechan to go to yochien every weekday, plus get swimming lessons on Fridays with many of her classmates....)

Itai vs. Dame: On Conversations with a 16-Month-Old

Imoto's first language, to the extent she uses language, is Japanese. I'll be writing about onechan's adjustment to life in English tomorrow, but today I want to look at imoto's. Unlike her older sister, who started using words like "wan-wan" (the sound a dog makes in Japanese, but also the name of the lead character on Inai Inai Ba, both girls' favorite toddlers' show on Japanese tv) and "atta" (that--often in reference to a dog she spotted in the distance while we were driving around) from a very young age and built up quite an extensive vocabulary of complaints in Japanese in the first half of her first year, imoto has been much more what we expected from a toddler hearing both Japanese and English at home. She's a real listener and in Dunkirk has gone back to doing what she was doing our last month in Fukuoka--repeating a lot of words and sounds. (For a stretch there in Chiba, she was talking in phrases and sentences in a language mostly of her own invention.) Every once in a while she'll pull out the right word in the right contest ("ohayo" to baba one morning, "owata" when she finished breakfast this morning), just to show off what she knows. But she's found she can get around all day mainly using only two words: "mama" and "itai."

At first, I thought she was calling me "Mama" mistakenly, or out of a desire to tease me (this is actually quite plausible, given her sense of humor--she started doing "inai inai ba" [peekaboo] to other people and giggling uproariously at the drop of a hat before she was 6 months old, if memory serves [and it usually doesn't]), but then I realized that she uses "mama" to let someone else know that she wants something from them. When pressed, she'll throw in another word--like "gigi" for some kind of drink (again confusing, because that's the baby word for grandpa, really)--to specify what it is she wants. But in most circumstances, she'll repeat "mama" until someone figures out what she wants.

"Itai!" is what you say when you're hurt in Japanese--like "ow" or "ouch" in English. But imoto uses "itai" for anything she doesn't like. She'll throw herself on the ground and repeatedly scream "itai" if stop her from doing something she really wants, for instance, which got us all kinds of looks when she did this in public in Fukuoka, Chiba, and Tokyo. Nothing like the sight of a gaijin carrying around a gaijin-looking toddler who's screaming "itai" into his ear in a supermarket to get the concerned looks....

Imoto's gone from being the Happy Science Girl to being the Fearless Stunt Girl. Thanks to onechan and her friends, imoto is all into climbing everything, "because it's there." So the words she most often hears from the tsuma and me are ones like

• "dame!" [dah-meh]: stop it!
  
• "abunai": that's dangerous!
  
• "kyotskute": be careful!
  
• "yasashii": be nice/gentle!
  

That last one usually comes up when onechan's throwing a tantrum of her own and of course becomes an easy target for pinching, poking, and hair-pulling.

These last two weeks, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, imoto has been going with her big sister to the day care place onechan went to most of the year before we left for Fukuoka. From next Tuesday on, however, she's on her own. Onechan is graduating to my university's children's center (more on this tomorrow). Oh, and did I mention that as much of a daddy's girl onechan is, imoto is a mommy's girl, and more? So of course we're more worried about how she's going to adjust to day care in a second language than onechan, for whom our anxieties are more diffuse and complex (on which more tomorrow).

As we were getting ready to leave Japan, I kind of figured that imoto would have the easiest transition of us all, but now I'm wondering if hers is going to be the most difficult, and by how far. It's hard enough for onechan to get her head around the fact that the way she talked to her friends in Japan will be incomprehensible to her friends in Fredonia and Dunkirk, much less the idea that most adults in the U.S. have even less Japanese than her dad (whom she's been teaching about a word a day)--what imoto will make of all this, I have no idea. I know she'll adjust and adapt eventually--but in what ways and with what effects on her personality and her Japanese, I just don't know.

The folks in Buffalo we are just starting to get to know who organize or use the yochien-like day care arrangement on Saturday mornings and Japanese language classes for older kids all emphasize that once the kids hit elementary school, it's tough to get them to keep speaking Japanese at home. But we haven't heard so much yet about 1-year-olds' adjustments. If you have, please let us know--thanks!

The Rip Van Winkle Effect

I did everything I could to avoid becoming Associate Chair of my department upon my return to the States from my Fulbright year in Japan, but had to settle for a one-semester gig in the end. If the position didn't give me +10 in boringness and -8 in cleverness, I'd write a witty riff on the above title to convey what a year leave does to my competence at and motivation for departmental service, but I think you get the picture.

In case, you don't, here's a random list of actual Rip Van Winkle moments in the English department office:

• "Why isn't this computer connecting to the internet? Ah, great, someone from AIT can come Friday afternoon to fix it--wonderful!" [Fast forward to Sunday morning, the first chance I have to get into the office that weekend.] "What?! How can this key not be working? Am I cursed?" [Result: plan to get to the office bright and early Monday morning, but don't actually make it in until the late afternoon.]
  
• "How could I have forgotten both my user ID and password for the key portal into everything I do as a teacher, advisor, and mentor?!" [Result: a series of increasingly-desperate calls to the Help Desk.]
  
• "Where is that damn page on the department's contributions to general education? I could have sworn it was easier to find in the old site design!" [Result: cranky email to department listserv, fortunately blocked by the listserv program, which no longer recognizes my address.]
  
• "I used to be able to use this program to update my home page and course web sites. Why can't I download the upgrade? What the heck do I use instead?!" [Result: More pestering of the Help Desk, followed by a call to the University Web Coordinator, who had fielded a similar panicked question from Fukuoka when the university changed its web security protocols on me. Turns out the correct program had been on my Mac's control strip all along; nobody ever told me that was pretty much the same secure FTP program that I had downloaded for my Japanese PC laptop. Live and learn.]
  
• "Yeah, it does sound like that course ought to count for that requirement. I wonder why it doesn't. Just what is our procedure for appealing transfer credit assignations these days? And what's the latest articulation agreement with that particular community college?" [Result: Sent the student to the new chair, to whom he would have eventually had to talk, anyway.]
  
• "I have a vague idea of what our policy on college credits for AP English scores used to be. I wonder what it is now? Time to send another student to the chair!"
  
• "Yeah, I think you'd better give me extra advisees, so that the new hires don't have to deal with more than 10 advisees their first semester on the job. And how about giving the other extras to a, b, c, and d? What?!--a and b are on leave?! Oh no!"
  
• "Well, I'm really going to have to talk to my wife before I agree to [that particular potential service commitment I shouldn't blog about]. She's starting a MLS program and all, so we have to see how this semester works out before I decide."
  
• "I'm sorry I didn't run for any union positions this election cycle. By the time the forms got to me in Japan, I had missed the key deadlines."
  

And this is just in my first two weeks back in the time zone and first week in the office.

Before/After

Before. After. Draw your own conclusions about the impact of teaching in Japan on my teaching in the U.S.

Starting Over

It's the first day of school! Which means it's time to announce a new programming schedule here at CitizenSE, now that the blog is on American time (even if I'm not yet).

Teaching Tuesday: I still won't blog about current students, but I will offer some reflections on the way I approach and handle teaching now that I'm back in the U.S. again.

Service Wednesday: After a service-free year in Japan, I should have one or two interesting thoughts on what it's like to ease myself back into the kinds of institution-building activities I devoted a good deal of my pre-tenure time to.

Free-form Thursday: Combines and replaces the old Unexpected Hawthorne Wednesday, CitizenSE Hawthorniana Link-o-rama Friday, and What Would Hawthorne Say.

Family Friday: Onechan will be having a yochien-like experience every Saturday in Buffalo, so combined with her American hoikuen and imoto's beginning onechan's old day-care arrangement on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Fredonia, I'll have plenty of stories to tell.

Research Weekend: A less quirky but more inclusive name than the old CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea, but basically fulfills the same function and allows me to make my old Close Reading Tuesday and Intertextual Thursday posts a little more substantive.

Yes, I'm turning CitizenSE into a less research-centric blog than it has been in the past. The leave is most definitely over, but it's not just that. I figure I ought to try to better represent the full range of things I'm doing as a tenured professor. They're new enough and strange enough again to me after gaining some distance on them over the past year, literally and figuratively, that I should be able to do something interesting with them. And since my core audience seems to consist of fantastically-talented and incredibly-prolific graduate students, giving some perspective on (professional) life off the Research I track may be of interest to them.

Looking back over my summer output here, it's clear that the travel, talks, and teaching took a toll on my Hawthorne blogging. Putting myself back on a schedule may help CitizenSE get back on track--and help me regain my momentum on my primary research projects. We'll see!

Zutto Zutto Tomodachi; and, The Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far)

Cross-posted at Mostly Harmless

Has a better ring to it than "best friends 4evah," right? Well, it has about the same meaning. It's a line from the song onechan and her friends sang at the graduation ceremony for the older kids in her yochien this past spring. Since we're leaving Fukuoka before she can get to take part in a similar ceremony herself--in fact, we've already spent a full day in Chiba--I'm taking a break tonight from LPGA blogging to convey a big "sayonara" to all the Fukuoka friends she's leaving.

Maybe their parents can read them the Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far), courtesy of Uncle Bill Benzon, and leave a comment or three here for him and onechan....

July 9: For onechan [in response to this and that]
July 10: The discussion continues
July 11: Onechan's Adventure [in response to this]
July 12: Where's Onechan? and Calling Onechan! Calling Onechan!
July 14: Help is on the way and There They Are! Yippieeee! [in response to this]
July 17: Onechan's Choice
July 19: Calling all kidz! Calling all kidz! [in response to this]
July 23: Sigh
July 28: Catch you later alligator
August 1: Where's the bunny rabbit?

[Update (8/3/07): New one--Onechan Tells a Story]

[Update (8/11/07): Another new one--The Little Worm from Kansas]

[Update (8/14/07): And another--Twas brillig]

[Update (8/16/07): And yet another--Sparkychan & Gojochan Adventure Time Mystery Theatre]

[Update (8/21/07): Check the comments on the last installment (thus far) for onechan's and imoto's immediate reactions to Sparkychan and Gojochan showing up in Dunkirk!]

A Real Citizen of Somewhere Else Moment

So on the way to the local Matsuri festival, the tsuma voted in yesterday's historic parliamentary defeat for the LDP. Inside the junior high school gym, onechan and I had the following conversation.

Onechan: What is mama doing?
Me: She's voting.
O: I want to vote, too!
Me: You can't yet. You have to be older.
O: Go-sai? [Five?]
Me: No, bigger. Like 18 or 20.
O: You should vote, too.
Me: I can't vote in Japan. I can only vote in America.
O: Why?
Me: Well, you have to be a citizen to vote. Mama's a citizen of Japan. I'm a citizen of the U.S.
O: America?
Me: Yeah. So I can only vote in America. And mama can only vote in Japan. But you and imoto can vote in both countries when you get old enough.
O: [not that impressed]
Me: And then when you're even older you'll have to decide which one country you want to be a citizen of.
O: [not that impressed]
Me: OK, mama's done. Time to go to the festival!
O: Yeah!!

Berube Mayoral Campaign Kicks Off with Analogy Contest

Cross-posted at Mostly Harmless.

Because it's our last Friday in Fukuoka (for this year, that is) and we have it on good authority that "analogies are mostly the refuge of the simple-minded," I hereby announce that the Official Michael Berube Campaign for Mayor of Blogoramaville is leading off with an analogy contest. Just fill in the blanks on any or all of the following in comments!

1. Michael Berube:[x=Republican Presidential Candidate]::a:b
2. Michael Berube:[y=Possible Mayoral Competitor]::c:d
3. Michael Berube:[z=Possible Running Mate]::e:f
4. Michael Berube:g::h:i

And remember to keep it simple, stupid. No similes or metaphors allowed.

Lit Bloggers of the World Unite...

...you have nothing to lose but your self-respect and the esteem of your closest friends and colleagues. No, I'm not talking about the ongoing Mostly Harmless event--although Europhiles and Europeans among you may be interested in it. I'm talking about my campaign to get Michael Berube elected Mayor of Blogoramaville in 2008! Pass it on.

Programming Note

Sorry to report that blogging here will get sparser and lazier for the rest of the month and into August. Although my last class meets in a few minutes, I'll be busy grading and meeting with personal and family friends for farewells during our last two weeks here in Fukuoka. We're cramming a trip to Kagoshima into the second half of this week, as well (here's hoping the forecasts for another early typhoon in southern Kyushu turn out to be wrong this time). And let's not forget boxing, shipping, packing, and giving away our stuff. Fortunately we can leave some things with the tsuma's family in Chiba, where we'll be from July 31 through August 14th, but while there I'll be hanging with onechan and imoto's cousins for the first week and then grading the last set of papers during the second week. So I guess what I'm saying is that Citizen of Somewhere Else will be a bit of a lower priority than it's been even in the past two months. I'll try to make up for the lack of quantity here with quality when I do post. But my five regular readers know how rare that is even when the law of averages is working in my favor! But it's entirely possible the next time you "hear" from me here, this blog will be back on Eastern Standard Time. Or is that Daylight Savings?

Pattern Recognition: Historicizing U.S. Representations of Japan

This is the overview of U.S. representations of Japan I actually was able to give yesterday at the JASF, despite the storm. Over at Mostly Harmless today I'll give the conclusion to the talk, which speculated on what to expect in the next 25 years, and tomorrow here I'll discuss the Q&A (yes, I left 25 minutes for it, just as I wanted--love it when a plan comes together!).

But why this sudden popularity of Japanese popular culture in the U.S.? How does it relate to the history of U.S. representations of Japan? What light does my own personal history of engagements with Japanese popular culture shed on that larger history I focused on in my previous two talks? How does the history of U.S.-Japanese interactions and interrelations look from the perspective of 2007 rather than, say, 1995 or 1945?

Well, as I sketched out in my first two talks, the image of Japan shifted radically in American eyes, from an exotic, backward culture in the mid-nineteenth century to a modernizing, industrializing rising power at the turn into the twentieth century, to a militarist, imperialist enemy by the middle of that century, and then shifted again, from a key ally in the Cold War to a key economic rival in a post-Cold War era that some feared would lead to a broader competition over which country would be #1 in the next century. In part due to Japan’s economic troubles over much of the past decade, in part due to the decision of Japanese automakers to locate production facilities in the U.S., and in part due to a combination of American economic success and a new political focus on the War on Terror, the era of “Japan-bashing” and Japan panics came to an end much faster than anyone would have anticipated in the early 1990s. As Japanese political and economic leaders found some ways to cooperate with American neoliberals and neoconservatives, as trade frictions eased and American media attention to China and India’s economies seemingly overshadowed Japan’s, cultural exchanges of all kinds between the U.S. and Japan flourished in the 21st century.

What does this all mean? Certainly, for the W.W. II generation and their Baby Boomer children, Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, Nanking and Nagasaki, the Tokyo Tribunals and Article 9, and the samurai and the geisha continue to symbolize the poles and polarities of their representations of and responses to Japan. But I would argue that my generation and younger ones have very different perspectives on Japan--and that they are gaining a hearing from older generations. What I take from my own personal history is that younger Americans have many more windows on Japanese culture, many more lenses through which to examine images of Japan, much more access to uncut and unedited works from Japanese popular culture, a much wider and more varied range of clichés, conventions, stereotypes, and discourses to select from, identify with, question, or modify, and a much more vivid sense of being part of a global, transnational mix of cultures and styles than any Americans before them. As many people of my generation moved into positions in film, television, and literature that allowed them to follow through on the same kind of transnational influences that I had been unwittingly exposed to in my childhood and teenage years, it became clear that they brought a different attitude into their aesthetic, ethical, political, and theoretical dialogues with artists from different countries and cultures than in previous generations.

So I feel there’s cause for optimism in future U.S.-Japan relations based on Japan’s current association among many in the younger generations in America with cutting-edge youth culture, innovative entertainment technologies, and imaginative and varied animation techniques, styles, and stories, not to mention the fact that a wider range of Japanese popular subcultures are entering the mainstream of American popular culture on virtually their own terms than ever before. At the very least, the view from 2007 of the history of American representations of Japan gives more cause for optimism in future U.S.-Japan relations than, say, the view from 1945 or 1995. At most, we may be entering into a period where both Japan and the U.S. comfortably consider and treat each other as equals. But if the history of shifting American images of Japan teaches us anything, it’s just how volatile and subject to rapid reversals they are. It may turn out that the anime craze is our century’s version of japonisme, that the Harajuku cosuplayers are postmodern geisha, that this period will be swept away by history like a similar period in the 1920s. So let’s look ahead as soberly as we can.

The Rise and Fall of the Pacific Rim

Here's my take on 1973-1995 representations of Japan in American culture, which leads nicely into my first Mostly Harmless post from the third and last talk in my "Shifting American Images of Japan" series that may or may not be happening in a few hours (depending on how bad this typhoon turns out to be). If you read that one and its two sequels there, you'll be ready for tomorrow's post here....

By the mid-1970s, however, world politics and global economics again helped contribute to massive transformations in American representations of and relations with Japan. Under the pressure of President Nixon’s turn toward engaging the People’s Republic of China, the American defeat in Vietnam, and the oil shocks that opened and closed the decade, the attitudes, assumptions, and images of the early Cold War underwent a seismic shift. We can track such shocks, aftershocks, and tsunamis in American economic theory, popular culture, diplomacy, and public memory between 1973 and 1995. These images in elite and popular culture, however, don’t merely reflect what I’ll call, building on the work of Christopher Connery, “the rise and fall of the Pacific Rim”; they also pushed many in Japan and the U.S. during the 1990s to consider whether the American Century in Japan was coming to an end. At the close of the Cold War, many influential Americans were wondering—and worrying—where the U.S.-Japan relationship was headed.

Connery argues that Pacific Rim discourse arose in the mid-1970s as the early Cold War views of Japan and Asia became untenable in the U.S.; Japan was by then no longer a latecomer to modernity or a junior partner to the West, but instead a fully modernized and global economic power, leading other East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries down the road of efficiency, quality, high technology, and export-led growth. The Pacific, which formerly had been characterized as an American lake--part of the system of containment of Soviet expansionism--was now seen largely in economic terms, as a new frontier for multinational capital, a place where an American economy suffering from stagflation and energy crises could renew itself, an alternative to European social democracy and Soviet bloc state socialism. The imperative was to learn from Japan, as American futurologists like Alvin Toffler, sociologists like Ezra Vogel, and hosts of management consultants argued that Japan exemplified efficient orchestration of capital, technology, and labor, established best practices in management, and combined economic growth, equitable distribution of wealth, and social cohesion. Even revisionist work in the 1980s, such as Chalmers Johnson’s influential study, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, which emphasized Japan’s plan-rational rather than market-rational approach and characterized it as having a developmental rather than regulatory state, did so largely in order to point out lessons for the United States. By the mid-1980s, when Japan became a creditor nation, the idea that the future would be Japanese was so widespread in the U.S. that two kinds of backlashes developed in American popular culture--what I’ll call, following David Morley and Kevin Robins, techno-orientalism, and what came to be known as “Japan bashing.”

American cyberpunk, from the noir-ish stylings of science fiction films like Blade Runner and science fiction novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer in the 1980s to the more politicized and parodic portraits in Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in the early 1990s, picked up on, played with, and projected Pacific Rim discourse’s identification of Japan with the future. By performing variations on a Japan-dominated future--either through focusing on a down-and-out American trying to survive the gritty, corrupt, and violent underworld of Yakuza, urban sprawl, and great disparities of wealth and power, by emphasizing the dehumanizing aspects of life and work in Japanese corporate domes that dot an environmentally and economically devastated U.S., or by portraying Japanese salarymen and entertainers as rigid, racist, and out of touch with reality yet so rich as to be ubiquitous in cyberspace--these works register some of the anxieties evoked by Pacific Rim discourse. Technology in all these works is both enabling and alienating, titillating and threatening. Classic works of Japanese anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell should be seen as responses to the techno-orientalism of these and other versions of American cyberpunk.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, the tensions between Pacific Rim optimism and techno-orientalist anxieties prompted an even more extreme and pessimistic backlash against Japan. “Japan-bashing,” as it came to be known, emphasized fears of Japanese infiltration and invasion that hadn’t been aired so publicly in the U.S. since the World War II era. In fact, as Dower, Morley and Robins, Toshio Ueno, Masao Miyoshi, and many others have documented, the 1980s witnessed a recycling and upgrading of classic stereotypes from American WW II propaganda. Consider the interlocking use of smallness and largeness in the following images from American editorial cartoons and magazine covers. References to “economic Pearl Harbors,” “the Cold War is over and Japan won,” and the prospect of coming trade wars that could trigger actual armed conflicts between the U.S. and Japan began to appear with ever-increasing regularity and repetition in the U.S. business and international press. Hollywood films such as Black Rain and Rising Sun fed into this Japan panic, using the conventions of the thriller, the mystery, and the cross-cultural buddy movie to reach a mass movie-going audience. U.S. labor and government officials alike accused Japan of unfair business practices and lobbied for the opening of Japan to foreign trade and investment. In this climate, Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American, was beaten to death in 1982 by two recently laid-off Detroit auto workers who thought he was Japanese, and Yoshihiro Hattori, a Japanese exchange student was shot and killed by a panicked white Baton Rouge resident when he got lost on his way to a Halloween party in 1992 and knocked on the wrong door at the wrong time.

It is in this context that the two greatest crises in U.S.-Japan relations of the 1990s occurred, during President George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War and the planning for a Smithsonian museum exhibit on the Enola Gay that originally sought to educate the American public about historians’ debates over the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both enacted another kind of return of World War II to American diplomacy and public memory. With the Gulf War, Japan came under heavy criticism from the U.S.-led coalition for practicing mere “checkbook diplomacy” and hiding from its global responsibilities behind an outdated peace constitution. Soon later, a coalition of veterans’ organizations and Republican politicians demanded revisions to the plans for a National Air and Space Museum exhibit that they deemed too attentive to Japanese suffering and too skeptical toward the official rationale for the decision to use the atomic bomb. Even after multiple revisions were made, they remained dissatisfied with them, successfully shut down the exhibition, and forced the resignation of leading Smithsonian officials. Ironically, it was largely conservatives and religious leaders who had been the first in the U.S. to criticize the atomic bombings during the late 1940s and early 1950s when Democrats lead U.S. foreign policy; in 1995, with a new Republican majority in Congress looking to influence President Clinton’s foreign and domestic policy agenda, historians who criticized the Cold War consensus on the atomic bombings were accused of political correctness and a patriotism deficit.

By the mid-1990s, then, with the dissolution of Cold War conditions that had turned bitter enemies into staunch allies, American images of Japan had turned so negative that people on both sides of the Pacific worried over the prospects of a return to World War II-era relations. The American Century in Japan seemed to be over, a victim of Japanese overconfidence and American defensiveness. In response to the rise of nihonjinron discourse in Japan and announcements of a “Japan that can say ‘no’” rocketing around the world, Americans once again, just as in World War II, strove to turn positives among Japanese elites into negatives for American audiences. The title of Walter LaFaber’s late-1990s history of U.S.-Japanese relations, The Clash, which was heavily influenced by the fall of the Pacific Rim and the apparent end of the American Century in Japan, says it all—a narrative of inevitable conflict between the two countries was the order of the day. When even sober historians known for their pioneering treatment of tendencies toward American imperialism in U.S. foreign policy start echoing themes of the most nativist Japan-bashers, serious questions must be raised about the possibility for any American to develop a truly objective attitude toward and perspective on Japan.

The power of long-held images and recently-recycled representations to shape perceptions of reality, to color attitudes and feelings toward others, and to affect actions and interactions as well as intercultural communications might well lead to pessimistic conclusions about the capacity even for highly-educated and well-informed Americans with extensive personal experience in Japan to transcend their times. U.S. images of Japan may seem frozen into arrogantly negative or condescendingly positive stereotypes, or arbitrarily tossed on the waves formed by geopolitical and economic shifts and shocks.

Yet even during the 1980s and early 1990s, which many characterized as the lowest point in U.S.-Japan relations since World War II, there were other undercurrents, patterns in American representations of Japan that perhaps are more visible from our standpoint today than a decade ago.

For those undercurrents, go to Mostly Harmless--then see my next post for my rejoinder to the rather pessimistic conclusions of my first two talks, which ended their surveys in 1945 and 1995. How does Japan look differently to Americans in 2007 than at either of these low points in U.S.-Japanese relations? I can't answer that question in general, but I do offer a personal perspective over at Mostly Harmless.

From Wartime Enemy to Cold War Ally

Yes, Friday the 13th laziness on your bloggy menu today! Here's my survey of shifts in American representations of Japan between 1941 and 1973, delivered last Saturday at the JASF.

Last week, I focused on John Dower’s analysis of the use of animal imagery in American war propaganda to dehumanize Japanese soldiers during the Pacific War. This week, I want to interweave his emphasis with that of University of California at Riverside Asian American Studies scholar Traise Yamamoto, who in Masking Selves, Making Subjects demonstrates how Japanese people and culture were infantilized and feminized in American popular culture over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combining Dower’s and Yamamoto’s focuses allows me to illustrate how sharply American images of Japan shifted over the course of the 1940s and 1950s and to suggest what’s at stake in that transformation.

Consider this series of cartoons from the beginning, middle, and end of the Pacific War. Throughout, Japanese soldiers are represented as monkeys and apes, but note how the imagery, style, connotations, associations, and allusions shift from treacherous to rampaging to cute. Now examine the gender politics of these wartime images of Japanese soldiers and female victims and how they contrast with these Occupation-era images of Japanese women and American military personnel. Taken together, these images provide an index of changing American representational strategies toward Japan. Indeed, they might even be said to construct for their American audiences a series of versions of Japan: from pesky and annoying enemy, to dangerous and powerful enemy, to savage and bestial enemy, to welcoming and inviting subjects in a demilitarized society. The kimonos the Japanese women wear are particularly significant; they not only allude to pre-modern Japan, but also evoke the “Madame Butterfly” image that many feminist scholars have shown to be so influential on Western perceptions of Japan. Indeed, whether the metaphor is of husband and wife, parent and child, or teacher and student, the underlying story these images tell is of the power relations between the U.S. and Japan during the years of the Pacific War and Occupation.

Such shifts were even more prevalent and overt in materials prepared for those Americans being sent to defeat, occupy, and reconstruct Japan in the mid-1940s. In the 1945 propaganda efforts of On to Tokyo and Know Your Enemy--Japan, Japanese barbarism and lack of individuality were emphasized, according to the established wartime script, yet just a few months after they were released, images of women and children flooded the screen in Our Job in Japan just as its narrative shifted from a critique of Imperial Japan to the prospects of a thoroughly reconstructed, demilitarized, and democratized society. We should pay equal attention to the continuities between this Occupation training film and practically concurrent war-time propaganda as to their disjunctures, for the tension between them signals the divisions among those planning the Occupation of Japan.

As John Dower documents in Embracing Defeat, conflicts between the “Japan crowd” and the “China crowd” among U.S. foreign policy elites intensified as the tide of battle turned in America’s favor in the Pacific War. Soon after August 11, 1945, when Dean Acheson replaced Joseph Grew as undersecretary of state, it quickly became clear that the China crowd--associated with a desire for a more radical reconstruction of Japan than the more conservative reformists among the Japan crowd were advocating for--had won this intellectual, political, and institutional debate. Thus, although the noted Japanologists of the 1940s worked together to craft a U.S. Office of War Information report in December 1944, they were almost completely excluded from General MacArthur’s administration during the Occupation.

In retrospect, however, the distance between both crowds seems rather small. Both urged General MacArthur to rule indirectly through the Emperor, his advisors, and the Japanese state bureaucracy, in order to capitalize on the loyalty of the citizenry to familiar and traditional authority figures. Both were blind to the colonialist structures and implications of the Occupation, particularly in Okinawa. Both saw Japan primarily through the lens of American histories and interests.

And those interests would shift dramatically by the late 1940s, with serious implications for Japan, Asia, and the world. The “reverse course” in the American Occupation of Japan has been covered by a host of distinguished historians; the shifts from purging militarists to purging Communists, from demilitarizing to remilitarizing Japan, and from political to economic reform are too large and complex to cover here. But a quick look at two non-fictional films that focus on the U.S.’s role in East Asia during World War II, the first from 1944 and the second from 1953, can serve to illustrate how dramatically the “home front” image of Japan changed from World War II to the Cold War. The Battle of China, one of the final films in Frank Capra’s Why We Fight war propaganda series, emphasizes the heroism of the Chinese resistance to Japanese imperialism and war atrocities at a time when U.S. war planners thought the road to defeating Imperial Japan ran through China and geopolitical strategists hoped that supporting Chinese nationalist forces against Chinese communists and Japanese imperialists would lead to post-war benefits for the U.S. By contrast, the celebrated Victory at Sea television documentary series, produced after the communists won and the U.S. “lost” China--after, that is, Japan had shifted from wartime enemy to Cold War ally--surveys the exact same history, but this time with an emphasis on the Anglo-American joint effort with their colonized subjects in India and Southeast Asia to free China from Japanese imperialism. This is a story tailored to the Third World in the mid-1950s, implying that American leadership can protect them from Soviet or Chinese domination; the earlier pro-China, anti-Japan narrative is almost completely submerged in this effort to make the East Asian and Southeast Asian theaters in World War II relevant to the needs of the Cold War U.S. in the final months of the Korean War.

Hollywood, too, followed suit during the 1950s, promoting the U.S.-Japanese alliance in films whose plots hinged on American military personnel’s relationships with Japanese women. In sharp contrast to U.S. W.W. II movies like The Purple Heart (1944), which make violent and brutal acts of male Japanese soldiers against U.S. POWs representative of Japan itself, the relationships between male American soldiers and female Japanese civilians in movies such as Japanese War Bride (1952), Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), and Sayonara (1957) allegorized the new relationships between their respective countries. As these movies were produced just as and after new American immigration laws were dramatically transforming policies established in the nativist 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, they represent and enact the continuing stereotyping as well as challenges to racial prejudice happening in the United States during the 1950s around citizenship rights for descendants of Asian immigrants and civil rights for African Americans. Some aspects of American power in Japan and attitudes toward Asians are romanticized and naturalized in these films, but others are questioned and criticized. The love plot and its vicissitudes in each of these 1950s films makes possible a reeducation of sorts of American movie-going audiences. Their domestication of U.S.-Japan relations brought the Cold War home, helping to normalize the drastic shifts in U.S. policy toward Japan over the previous two decades.

Thus, even as some U.S. officials began calling for the rapid remilitarization of Japan, even as Japan became a crucial workshop during the Korean War, even as the American reconstruction effort shifted from the Occupation to a kind of East Asian Marshall Plan, even, that is, as Japan became the hub of American diplomatic, military, and economic efforts to contain Soviet and Chinese communism, the representative images of Japan in American popular culture came to be modernized geisha figures. Even as Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, Nanking and Nagasaki, and the Tokyo Tribunals and Article 9 came to symbolize the poles and polarities of American representations of and responses to Japan, so, too, did the samurai and the geisha. In part due to the emphasis and efforts of state and civil society within Japan and in part due to American preoccupation with communist enemies in the Soviet Union, China, Korea, and Vietnam during the 1950s through early 1970s, however, the feminized, receptive image of Japan seemed to have eclipsed the aggressive, militarist image of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

That's More Like It! Back to Lazy Blogging, JASF Edition

Time to set the table! What follows is the opening of a talk I gave last Saturday at the Japan-America Society of Fukuoka. For this coming Saturday's talk, which is FINALLY done, check out Mostly Harmless. Given how busy I am in our final month or so in Japan (on this stay, that is!), I'm going to subject my "readers" to more of this talk over the next few days. Not the best of meals, but what can you do?

This talk, “The End of the American Century in Japan? 1941-1995,” picks up where last week’s “From Manifest Destiny to War in the Pacific, 1846-1945” left off. In that talk, I gave a very rough sketch of the changing images of Japan in American eyes, from an exotic and backward culture in the mid-nineteenth century to a modernizing, industrializing rising power at the turn into the twentieth century, to a militarist, imperialist enemy by the middle of that century. I emphasized that such shifts should be understood in the context of American experiences with and representations of other non-U.S. cultures and countries and argued that they are often more revealing of American mindsets than Japanese realities. By showing how certain images and styles of representation get cut and pasted from one group to another or get recycled from one time period to another, I tried to suggest how complex and difficult it can be to understand and analyze them.

Implicit in my talk were the following questions. What is the relation between image and reality? Between attitude and action? How, for instance, did Commodore Matthew Perry’s studies of European writings on Japanese culture and society as he was preparing to lead his first expedition to Japan, along with his experiences fighting Mexicans and Indians in the Mexican War of 1846-1848, influence his strategies and tactics as a negotiator with bakufu representatives? In what ways may Washington war planners, all the way up to President Harry Truman, have been influenced by American war propaganda emphasizing the brutal savagery of the Japanese military and the fanatical loyalty of the Japanese citizenry, particularly in the spring and summer of 1945?

These questions, of course, raise larger and even more difficult ones. To what extent can subjective human beings limited to partial perspectives understand each other objectively? Indeed, is such objectivity possible or desirable? This is not only a question of knowledge, understanding, and truth; it is also a question of how to understand the nature of reality. If we are tempted to argue that Americans often and perhaps even consistently mischaracterized Japan between 1846 and 1945, by what standard do we judge their characterizations to be mistaken? If even Japanese self-images of this time period do not escape the difficulties and complexities of aesthetic and political representation, where is such a standard to be found?

These issues in the relation between representation and reality, in turn, raise questions about how to characterize the first century of U.S.-Japanese relations. Was the Pacific War an inevitable conflict between two rising and expansionist powers with claims to and designs on the Pacific? Was it a blip in an otherwise amicable bilateral partnership? Was it a relatively arbitrary swing of a randomly seesawing relationship?

I’m going to return to these questions at the end of this talk. But first, by focusing on the shifts between 1941 and 1995 in American representations of Japan from wartime enemy to Cold War ally to economic rival, I’ll emphasize just how complex and difficult they are--and how much is at stake in them.