Representing Japan in American Culture

Attending the JAAS conference here at Rikkyo University in the Ikebukuro neighborhood of Tokyo has helped me focus my thinking on the talks I'm going to give at the Japan-America Society of Fukuoka on June 30 (“From Manifest Destiny to War in the Pacific: 1846-1945”), July 7 (“The End of the American Century in Japan? 1946-1995”), and July 14 (“What[’s] Next: The Past 25 Years and the Next”). The panel/workshop "Migrating Cultures" in particular has encouraged me to emphasize in my talks what has been a part of my Representing Japan course but not its main emphasis--the broader historical and political context in which American representations of Japan are produced, distributed, and consumed, as well as the overlaps and interarticulations of myths, stereotypes, ideologies, and discourses on Japan and the Japanese with those of other racialized places and groups within and outside the U.S.

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about here (and what I'm going to be talking about in Fukuoka). I start my first talk in 1846 with the Mexican War and the idea of American manifest destiny in order to emphasize that the first American-produced images of Japan--coming out of Commodore Perry's voyages to Japan in 1853 and 1854--were made possible and were part of a process of U.S. westward expansion, over both land and sea. Between the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the gold rush in 1849, the U.S. government had great incentives to turn their paper purchase of what is now the American Southwest into actual U.S.-controlled territory, so as to have a Pacific port for exploration, trade, and continuing expansion of U.S. military and strategic interests. White Americans' prior experiences with, and representations of, African Americans, American Indians, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, and peoples of the south Pacific and Caribbean thus influenced their views of Japan and the Japanese people. After briefly examining some of those early images, I flash forward to the turn of the century and put American re-examinations of Japan in light of Meiji-era industrialization, modernization, and expansionism in the context of the U.S.'s own parallel processes (epitomized by the many Indian Wars of the late 19th C, the annexation of Hawaii, the Spanish-American War and the debates over immigration from Asia and from Southern and Eastern Europe). By contrasting Lafcadio Hearn's, Jack London's, and George Kennan's views of Japan, I show how Americans were in part debating their own society's imperial turn at the turn into the twentieth century. I then flash forward again to the 1930s and 1940s.

Seeing as I have to go to the last panel/workshop right now, this will have to be, as usual, continued....

"Death Is a Nice Sandman"

Thanks to Gillian Brown's wide-ranging reading of Hawthorne's histories for children, particularly Grandfather's Chair, in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004), I was reminded that Neil Gaiman's Sandman draws its inspiration from all over the map--including Hans Christian Anderson's "The Sandman." It was a nice touch to turn the original Sandman's brother Death into Dream's gothy sister--wondering if the specific quotation that supplies the title to this post inspired Gaiman's characterization of Death. Seems spot-on to me.

Postbellum Hauntings

I'm about to go teach "Rappaccini's Daughter," but wanted to do a quick follow-up on one of the many loose threads here at CitizenSE--a comment or two on the relation between the hauntings in Charles Chesnutt's "Po' Sandy," Ambrose Bierce's "The Haunted Valley" and "The Stranger," and Lafcadio Hearn's "On Ghosts and Goblins." What I've been trying to emphasize in the Haunting America course I've been teaching this semester is the relation between literature and history. To the key course question, "What is haunting (about) America?" one answer I've been emphasizing is its history of conflicts and tensions over land, wealth, and power. Chesnutt suggests the history of slavery haunts the postbellum South, Bierce suggests that the Indian wars and other conflicts engendered by the massive migrations to the newly U.S.-owned (but not yet held) Southwest after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gold Rush haunt the frontier, and Hearn puts Japanese and American hauntings in relation even as his travels and writings suggest parallels between the late 19th C modernizing and expansionist programs in Gilded Age America and Meiji Japan. Elaborations to come--later!

Time Flies When You're Not on a Schedule

I've been keeping up with my kids/family blogging mostly at Mostly Harmless, but I'm going to take advantage of the freedom from the CitizenSE Programming Schedule to fill you in on the events of the extended weekend and the doings of the Dramatis Personae here in Fukuoka. With less than two months to go in the Fulbright year, we are already missing it and already nostalgic for it. So we've been doing a lot together as a family and meeting other families, trying to pack as much into the time remaining here that we can.

Onechan has started taking swimming lessons on Fridays with her yochien classmates, so after giving her a few sessions on her own "to get her feet wet" without us, this past Friday we decided to see what it was like. We got to take a 10-minute bus ride from the yochien to the pool, riding with the middle class of three in her yochien, their teacher, and the other parents (well, moms) and younger siblings. It was a lot of fun to see and hear the kids' rapid mood swings, from the excited race to the yochien gate to see who would be first to get in line for the bus to the exuberant conversation as the bus left the school bus to the first dispute that lead to tears to getting excited again as the bus pulled into the pool lot. We could only wonder what onechan's ride was like--the younger and older classes were on a different bus. When we got to the pool, we waited with the other moms and younger siblings in a glass-enclosed area as the yochien kids went into the locker room to change and eventually emerged into the pool area. All three classes had to march in, following their leader, then line up for warm-up dancing/stretching, then march over to the part of the lane that was blocked off for them. Onechan was in a group of two girls and two boys (the youngest in the yochien). They practiced getting in the pool, jumping up and down in the water, getting water on their face and heads (and wiping it away from their eyes), holding hands and converging on the center of their circle and moving back away from it, going under and inside and under and outside a floating hula hoop (which invariably got raised a bit so they wouldn't have to submerge completely if they didn't want to), then going through the same hula hoop held perpendicular to and partly above the water surface (most would lift it higher so they could get under without getting their faces wet), then running in a circle while the teacher made waves, and on to other games to get them comfortable in the water and used to being wet. Right next to them, the middle and oldest classes were running through the same exercises more quickly and going on to more advanced things. There was no real drama, except when onechan tripped and her teacher had to do a quick rescue (she didn't cry at the time, only when they were waiting for the bus to return to the yochien, and then only for a little bit), but it was totally hilarious and cute to watch her and her friends in the water. You could really see the kids' personalities in the different ways they approached doing the same thing--and how different many of them were in the water from the way we were used to seeing them in the playground at the yochien. We got a bit sad that we wouldn't get to see onechan doing what the middle and oldest classes did in the coming years, but for the most part were too busy cracking up to worry at the time.

The next day, we also got to see a bunch of kids together--this time, ages 4-12--when we sat in on an English Day for an elementary school that one of my Japanese professor friends helped organize and which his oldest daughter attends. Like with the swimming lessons, the kids were divided into groups by age and performed skits or sang songs that allowed them to learn together, without anyone being put on the spot or singled out. With all the parents and younger siblings in attendance for this two-hour program, there must have been 50 kids and 30 adults there. My friend said that he started volunteered in April, teaching English for the youngest kids after school; each week, more and more kids signed up, until he had to start turning them away after the class reached double digits. So there's great interest and enthusiasm in English in this eastern suburb of Fukuoka. After the program ended, we visited the professor's family at their house. The girls loved playing with their 6-year-old girl, 4-year-old boy, and 3-year-old boy. We went shopping at Costco for barbecue materials and ended up staying until 10 pm. We would have stayed overnight with them, but we didn't bring diapers for imoto and we had another meeting set up with a different Japanese professor's family in a different part of town on Sunday morning. This visit also involved a train ride out of the central city area and then a car ride to their actual residence. The girls had a great time playing with their 3-year-old daughter and her neighbors at their small apartment complex. Onechan never quite got the hang of riding a bike or jumping rope, but she sure got a lot of practice. And imoto learned what skinning her knee felt like, as she kept trying to walk too fast on the sloped and rough pavement. We got a chance to talk about living in the States with the professor and his wife, the first of many conversations to come, as they will be moving to western Pennsylvania in late July so he can do some advanced graduate work and professional development. We're already looking ahead to getting together in the States.

One of the amazing things about the Fulbright year has been seeing what the lives of couples with young children in Fukuoka are like. We've been fortunate to get to know many families with infants through the kominkan system, many parents with pre-school kids through onechan's yochien, international couples with largely younger children through the Mixi group that meets at various places in the city as well as online, and even some families with kids in elementary and secondary schools through my faculty contacts. It's given us a lot to think about in terms of what's best for our own children and what options we can and should pursue as an international family.

But home is calling us, too. There have been a few births among faculty friends and news of more to come in the fall and winter. There have been new hires in my department and elsewhere. We're already making plans to send our stuff back to the States, get the utilities for the house back in our name, and have a new Prius ready for us to buy when we get back in mid-August. The tsuma is signing up for courses in her Masters in Library Science program that starts in late August around the time my semester does. It's hard to anticipate how much the place has changed in our absence--or assess how much we have. But it's hard not to try.

Maybe imoto's recent clinginess--calling for her mom whenever she's out of sight, wanting me to hold her as much as possible and crying when I leave for work--is tied to this feeling we have of being in two places at once, and neither. Speaking of which, it's time to finish what I need to do here in the office and head home!

Taking Off the Training Wheels

What a crazy week! From a feverish day and night before I started teaching to almost losing my voice while teaching, I am sad to report that my health has been at its worst since January. The measles epidemic sweeping Japan has reached Fukuoka, which shouldn't affect my family, since we've all been vaccinated (even imoto, although hers may not kick in fully until next week), but since the strain here may be different than what onechan and I have been inoculated against, and since it is rampaging among the college-age population in Japan (most of whom never got vaccinated as children), I'm not going to be taking any chances. So that means more sleep and fewer late nights/early mornings. On top of that, I have four lectures to give in June and July, which is a lot for me, and I'm getting drawn deeper into the rhythm of the book manuscript's revision and addition process. Plus, the second week of June I'll be spending almost a week in the Tokyo/Chiba area with limited internet access and the week after that I'll be taking off a couple of days to meet up with friends visiting Japan in the Kyoto area. After that, I can foresee lots of meetings with students as they work on their final projects, grading, preparing my American classes, and getting ready to return to the States.

The upshot for CitizenSE is not that I'll be going on a leave or anything as drastic as that. But, from June through August, I will be ending the programming schedule that's sustained and structured my blogging here since December 2006. (Look for a new one in September, once I've figured out the rhythm of my semester back home.) For the next three months I won't be putting pressure on myself to maintain the 7 days/week schedule I've done a pretty decent job of sticking to, all things considered. And I won't be visiting my blogroll nearly as often as I've done this spring. I'll still be labelling posts that fit the old programming schedule's categories as appropriate, disregarding what day they happen to fall on. And I may be trying out some new labels/categories. But I'll be following a more organic flow from post to post, developing some ongoing series, and weaving the many loose ends I've left hanging for a while back into the mix.

Hope you like it!

Labor Theories of Blogging

Ah, I'm coming far too late to the left theory blogs' discussion of blogging and/as labor and I'm too feverish to even think about linking to any of the participants' posts or contributing somthing original, but I can point interested people in the direction of Teresa Goddu's essay on Hawthorne and class, an excellent linking of "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe" and "Ethan Brand" that focuses on Hawthorne's representation and use of laborers in antebellum U.S. fiction. It's in What Democracy Looks Like, ed. Amy Shrager Lang and Cecelia Tichi, and I recommend the entire collection for reasons I will explain later. My basic idea for the connection is that blogging is a form of publishing as emergent as short stories were in the 1830s-1840s U.S. Goddu's analysis of what work Hawthorne's representations and narratives do--for himself, for the emergent middle class--is worth connecting to labor theories of blogging. More on that later--got to get well enough to teach tomorrow!

What Would Hawthorne Say About YouTube?

Seeing as how he didn't put his older kids in school almost the entire time his family was in England, only intermittently hired someone to watch/teach them, and that he and Sophia's "home schooling" efforts were desultory by today's standards, I think he would have appreciated it as a way to broaden his kids' horizons. Onechan certainly does and it's fun to watch with her.