Modernization, Imperialism, and the Debate Over Japan

The lazy blogging from my upcoming talk continues...

Modernization, Imperialism, and the Debate over Japan

The continuing influence of this initial image of Japan as an exotic and backward society can be seen even in the writings of a sympathetic turn-of-the-century participant-observer like Lafcadio Hearn, who showed a marked preference for traditional and folk culture throughout his fourteen years of living in Japan. It’s not that he was unaware of the rapid modernization, industrialization, and nationalist consolidation of Japan in the Meiji era--surely the parallels between Japanese and American expansionism from the mid-1860s until his death in 1904 (after a civil war, the victors first gained control of core territories, then asserted influence abroad through annexation and occupation) didn’t escape him. Indeed, as distinguished Hearn scholar Roy Starrs has recently argued, it was precisely Hearn’s love of traditional Japanese culture that lead him to excuse and indeed support the very state policies in Japan that lead him to leave the United States and give up his American citizenship. At the end of his 1904 work, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, Hearn justifies the Meiji regime’s wars against China and Russia as attempts to preserve Japanese sovereignty against a gathering threat of European imperialism and cautions the regime to preserve as much of traditional Japanese culture as possible to avoid Western cultural imperialism.

It’s worth contrasting Hearn with another well-travelled American contemporary of his who in his journalism and fiction came to opposite conclusions about the tendency and legitimacy of Meiji-era transformations: Jack London. In such articles as “The Yellow Peril” and “If Japan Should Awaken China,” such short stories as “Goliath” and “The Unparalleled Invasion,” and most notably in his dystopian science fiction novel of 1908, The Iron Heel, London characterizes Japan as a potentially imperialist threat to China, the West, and the international socialist movement. As University of California at Berkeley American literature scholar Colleen Lye demonstrates in her brilliant study America’s Asia, London was particularly worried that Japanese military and management prowess and Chinese size and labor/trading capacity could combine to form a commercially dynamic, technologically advanced rival to Anglo-American civilization.

One way of reading these diametrically opposed attitudes toward and images of Japan from Hearn and London is to link their Pacific writings to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century debates within American culture over the U.S.’s own modernization, industrialization, national consolidation, and expansionism. Hearn’s sympathy for a putatively anti-colonial Japanese imperialism and London’s horror at a putatively imperialist Japanese anti-colonialism are two sides of the same coin. They express the ambivalence many Americans were feeling toward the transformations of their own society and culture. With Germany and Russia, Japan and the U.S. were leading rising powers in an age characterized by the dominance of the British Empire; each modernizing nation-state had to choose whether to follow or how to modify the templates of European imperialism established by the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and British. It was precisely Japan’s similarities to the U.S. around 1900 that made its actions such a controversial mirror for even dissident Americans of the time.

Why Close Reading Matters I: Guantánamo Bay Poetry

Yoshie Furuhashi just forwarded the following Wall Street Journal article, Yochi Dreasen's The Prison Poets of Guantánamo Find a Publisher, along with a link to the collection of poetry it is about, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (Iowa, 2007) to the MLA's Radical Caucus's listserv. It's particularly relevant to me not just as a scholar and teacher interested in Hawthorne's portrayal of Puritan punishments or as a fan of Alan Moore's comic book series V for Vendetta, but also as a teacher of courses like Introduction to Ethnicity/Race and American Identities. I hope it will be of interest to you, too. Perhaps the following quotations will help inspire you to inquire into the reasoning behind the title of this post:

"While a few detainees at Guantanamo Bay have made efforts to author what they claim to be poetry, given the nature of their writings they have seemingly not done so for the sake of art," says Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Defense Department spokesman. "They have attempted to use this medium as merely another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies."

U.S. authorities explained why the military has been slow to declassify the poems in a June 2006 letter to one of Mr. Falkoff's colleagues. "Poetry...presents a special risk, and DOD standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language," it said. The military says poetry is harder to vet than conventional letters because allusions and imagery in poetry that seem innocent can be used to convey coded messages to other militants.

The letter told defense lawyers to translate any works they wanted to release publicly into English and then submit the translations to the government for review.

The strict security arrangements governing anything written by Guantanamo Bay inmates meant that Mr. Falkoff had to use linguists with secret-level security clearances rather than translators who specialize in poetry. The resulting translations, Mr. Falkoff writes in the book, "cannot do justice to the subtlety and cadences of the originals."

For the military, even some of the translations appeared to go too far. Mr. Falkoff says it rejected three of the five translated poems he submitted, along with a dozen others submitted by his colleagues.

Cmdr. Gordon says he doesn't know how many poems were rejected but adds that the military "absolutely" remains concerned that poetry could be used to pass coded messages to other militants.

And maybe those with somewhat freer time than mine might, say, move from taking down Ann Althouse to taking on the American military's approach to literature. If I had the time, I would tell a long story about how Tom Keenan taught a 1980s'-era CIA-authored counter-insurgency manual's discussion of rhetoric in a grad course I was taking on literary theory, but I have holes to plug in one talk and another to start before I sleep....

We Take Requests II

When Hug the Shoggoth asks about one of the section titles of next week's talk, CitizenSE listens. And excerpts:

Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the “Opening” of Japan

It makes sense to begin a history of shifting American images of Japan with the expeditions headed by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 and 1854. But I want to start in the previous decade with the Mexican War of 1846-1848, for there is a direct connection between it and the appearance of the Black Ships off Edo Bay. Beyond the fact that Perry himself was a celebrated veteran of the Mexican War, I will go further and claim that the “opening of Japan” was made possible by the “winning of the West.” To see why this is so, let’s review the larger history of U.S. westward expansion over the course of the nineteenth century and examine notions of American manifest destiny that became popular by mid-century.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States went from being a small nation of thirteen states on the east coast of North America to a large nation in possession and control of much of the continent, including the noncontiguous territories of Alaska and Hawaii. Before the Mexican War, the largest expansion of U.S. borders occurred in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. What we now know as the Haitian Revolution, the world’s only successful slave revolt, made this purchase possible, as France lost interest in its North American holdings after losing the most valuable colony in the New World at the end of the eighteenth century. It took most of the first half of the nineteenth century for the U.S. to actually control the territory it purchased, as Indian Wars and Indian Removals punctuated crises and compromises over the expansion of American slavery. But by the mid-1840s, after the purchase of the Oregon territory from England, a border dispute between the recently-independent nation of Mexico (formerly New Spain) and the even-more-recently independent Republic of Texas (formerly part of Mexico) provided a pretext for the U.S. to start the Mexican War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war in 1848 on highly favorable terms to the U.S., along with the California gold rush in 1849, gave the U.S. government great incentive to turn their paper purchase of what is now the American Southwest into actual U.S.-controlled territory, not least to have Pacific ports for exploration, trade, and projection of military forces and strategic interests. Although this process was interrupted by the Civil War and took up much of the second half of the nineteenth century, even by mid-century many American explorers, scientists, and missionaries had joined the whalers and traders criss-crossing the Pacific—not to mention Herman Melville, who published several novels set in the Pacific and Pacific islands years before Perry arrived in Japan.

Having reviewed this process of U.S. westward expansion over both land and sea, we are now in a position to appreciate how white Americans’ prior experiences with, and representations of, enslaved Africans and their African American descendants, American Indians, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, and peoples of the Caribbean and Pacific influenced their views of Japan and the Japanese people. The Perry expeditions also relied on European, particularly Dutch and English, accounts of Japanese culture and society, which were shaped in part by their own histories of colonization of Asia and elsewhere. Combined with the fact that the U.S. delegation wasn’t permitted to visit major Tokugawa cities, it’s no wonder the earliest American representations of Japan focused on exotic landscapes, architecture, and clothing, on village culture, non-Western religion, primitive technology, and simple weaponry, as John Dower’s Black Ships and Samurai documents. They fastened on what their history prepared them to see.

Please tell me how to make this better! And, if possible, shorter!

To Delight and Instruct: Required Reading for Grad Students (and Others)

Click here. Read and click as directed, until done. End public service announcement. Back to bad bad bad bad bad ok bad bad bad bad bad decent bad bad bad bad [good coming anytime soon?] writing.

Shifting American Images of Japan

Still submerged in the non-bloggy writing process, so I'm going to do a cheap post today which excerpts my opening moves in my first of three lectures on shifting American images of Japan--it gives an overview of the lecture series, so should be of relatively general interest!

Thank you, Murahashi-san, for your generous and kind introduction. And thank you for the invitation to speak here once again--or rather, I should say, to follow up on my February talk with this “American Studies 101” lecture series. Its topic, “Shifting American Images of Japan,” has interested me for a long time, since I first became aware that a good deal of the popular culture I grew up on came from Japan or was influenced by Japanese culture, but I only started researching it in earnest two summers ago, back when I began working on my application for a Fulbright grant to teach American Studies in Japan. Having taught the course based on that research, “Representing Japan in American Culture,” to two classes of entering students in Kyushu University’s 21st Century Program this semester and last as a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer, I’m eager to share the results of my research and teaching with a wider audience. So thank you very much for inviting me back here and giving me the opportunity to do just that.

My talk today is entitled “From Manifest Destiny to War in the Pacific, 1846-1945,” but before I attempt to cover 99 years of American images of Japan in 33 minutes, I should say just a little bit more about the lecture series and the course it is based upon. I designed “Representing Japan in American Culture” as an introduction to American cultural studies for first-year undergraduate students in Japan. My goal was to offer a survey of changing American images of Japan, focusing on their form and structure, development and context, and effects and stakes. Along the way, I also emphasized the acquisition and development of certain interpretive methods and intellectual skills, such as close, contextual, and comparative reading and viewing and critical thinking, writing, and speaking. I wanted my students to be able, by the end of the course, to analyze any American image of Japan they happened to come across, from any time period, using a variety of approaches--but especially to consider how it relates to the history of American representations of Japan, what it reveals about American culture and society of its time, how it compares to Japanese self-representations, what it contributes to our understanding of present and future of U.S.-Japanese relations, and what it suggests about the possibilities and pitfalls of cross-cultural representation and intercultural communication. Through weekly readings, viewings, lectures, and discussions, a group presentation, and a final research paper, my students not only got many chances to practice these various analytical methods but also got to practice communicating their ideas and insights in a variety of fora and formats. In a sense, then, this lecture series is my own final exam: how well will I be able to do what I ask of my students? how effectively can I condense the flavor of my Representing Japan course?

Well, I want to start by commenting on one sentence from Murahashi-san’s preview flyer in particular: “By reviewing how America has observed Japan, the lectures will give a unique opportunity to see Japan in the reflections of American eyes and reflect on what those images reveal about American observers.” This language--of image and imagery, viewing and reviewing, vision and revision, reflecting and reflection, sight and insight, eyes and Is, observers and observed--should call to mind a variety of associations, from the inevitable distortions of any reflection to the necessity of perspective to the eyes as the mirror of the soul. It should call our attention to the relations between objectivity and subjectivity, perceptions and ideas, the material and the visual/discursive, and more. But we shouldn’t allow the richness of this language to lead us to assume that U.S.-Japanese representations and relations should be studied in isolation, as if the two countries were alone in the world, endlessly mirroring one another.

To counter this assumption, my goal in these three talks is to introduce you to the broader historical and political contexts in which American representations of Japan are created, circulated, and consumed. By demonstrating how American images of Japan borrow from and are in dialogue with representations of other countries and cultures, I aim to encourage you to look at American and Japanese history differently.

Today, then, I focus on representations of Japan from three time periods--the mid-nineteenth century, the turn into the twentieth century, and the mid-twentieth century--in order to recontextualize the War in the Pacific. My talk is divided into three sections--“Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan,” “Modernization, Imperialism, and the Debate over Japan,” and “Militarization, Propaganda, and the War in the Pacific”--that look in turn at key patterns in and examples from American images of Japan in the 1840s and 1850s, the 1890s and 1900s, and the 1930s and 1940s.

So what do you think? Let me know before June 30th!

Perhaps It's Better to Be the Obscurest Blog on teh Internets

Heading off in a few hours to Hiroshima to meet some old friends now living in Oklahoma (that is, when they're not enjoying the best two-week-tour-of-Japan itinerary I've ever seen in my life--and I'm not just saying that b/c it's the only one). So of course I woke up way too early and I thought, "why not catch up on some bloggy doings?" Let's just say I should have stayed in bed. Stay strong, Scott, Chris, Ilyka, Kevin.... This, too, will pass.

We Take Requests Here at CitizenSE

A Japanese colleague of mine whom I've responded to here before recently asked me what I had on the sketch "The Intelligence Office." I emailed him back with some quick ideas and promised an update here. This is it (or maybe the first part if I can't finish it between classes today!).

As you can see here, the only time I've previously blogged on "The Intelligence Office" is to link it to Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen in an aborted larger argument aiming to show Hawthorne's intimate knowledge of the importance of international trade (including the slave trade) on the fortunes of Salem, colonial New England, and the northeastern United States. The narrator's comment, "Judging from its description, it was beautiful enough to vanish like a dream, yet substantial enough to endure for centuries," could apply to the idea of America as easily as it could to the estate of the "man of deplorable success." And indeed there are several sharp ripostes at American politics and imperialism sprinkled throughout the sketch.

But as you can see from the following excerpt from my email response to my colleague--

I think "The Intelligence Office" is a very interesting sketch. If you have time, I strongly recommend Kristie Hamilton's arguments on the importance of Hawthorne's sketches in general, in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004) or in her book America's Sketchbook (1998).

My own interest in the sketch is different from her emphasis on Hawthorne's anticipation of modernist (and even postmodernist) aesthetic and social issues. I'm interested in the 19th C and earlier resonances of his emphasis on "proper place" (which I use to investigate Hawthorne's ideas on race, class, and gender politics).

--what I am most interested in is the way "The Intelligence Office" provides evidence that Hawthorne in the early 1840s was engaging his culture's interests in the relations between the external and the internal, the material and the spiritual, the physical and the psychological, the real and the symbolic, between manners and morals, appearances and essences, in everything from transcendentalism and romanticism to phrenology and physiognomy to the American School of Ethnography. If you read the sketch alongside such earlier meditations on these subjects as "Fancy's Show Box," "Roger Malvin's Burial," and "Young Goodman Brown," you'll see it reworking that earlier interest in the relations between thoughts and actions. And if you read it alongside contemporary or later tales and sketches like "A Virtuoso's Collection," "The Procession of Life," "The Birth-mark," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "The Christmas Banquet," "Earth's Holocaust," and "The Custom House"--or novels like The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun--you'll see Hawthorne's abiding interest in classification schemes of all kinds.

The scholarly work I'd most recommend for understanding the context for Hawthorne's engagement of these issues is Samuel Otter's brilliant study Melville's Anatomies--I can't think of a better evocation of the times or investigation of an author's engagement with them than any other recent work except Eduardo Cadava's Emerson and the Climates of History, and Otter more systematically analyzes the various attempts to know (human) nature in the antebellum period than Cadava.

As for myself, I find Hawthorne's suggestion at the beginning of the story and confirmation at the end that the agent of the sketch's "Central Intelligence Office" to be the "Recording Spirit" a fascinating anticipation of Destiny in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series of comics and graphic novels. Certainly Hawthorne is engaging religious themes that energized the Puritans--the difficulty of reconciling God's omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence--when he has the agent reveal

"My agency in worldly action--my connection with the press, tumult, and intermingling, and development of human affairs--is merely delusive. The desire of man's heart does for him whatever I seem to do. I am no minister of action, but the Recording Spirit!"

Thus the opening simile--"He looked like the spirit of a record--the soul of his own great volume--made visible in mortal shape"--and the intermediate elaboration of the book of life metaphor within it--

Human character in its individual developments--human nature in the mass--may best be studied in its wishes; and this was the record of them all.... It would be an instructive employment for a student of mankind, perusing this volume carefully, and comparing its record with men's perfected designs, as expressed in their deeds and daily life, to ascertain how far the one accorded with the other. Undoubtedly, in most cases, the correspondence would be found remote. The holy and generous wish, that rises like incense from a pure heart toward heaven, often lavishes its sweet perfume on the blast of evil times. The foul, selfish, murderous wish, that steams forth from a corrupted heart, often passes into the spiritual atmosphere, without being concreted into an earthly deed. Yet this volume is probably truer, as a representation of the human heart, than is the living drama of action, as it evolves around us. There is more of good and more of evil in it; more redeeming points of the bad, and more errors of the virtuous; higher up-soarings, and baser degradation of the soul; in short, a more perplexing amalgamation of vice and virtue, than we witness in the outward world. Decency, and external conscience, often produce a far fairer outside, than is warranted by the stains within. And be it owned, on the other hand, that a man seldom repeats to his nearest friend, any more than he realizes in act, the purest wishes, which, at some blessed time or other, have arisen from the depths of his nature, and witnessed for him in this volume. Yet there is enough, on every leaf, to make the good man shudder for his own wild and idle wishes, as well as for the sinner, whose whole life is the incarnation of a wicked desire.

--allows the story to be read as a gloss on abstract, even universal problems of theology and ethics. But I think even this version of the sketch is an interesting anticipation of Gaiman's Endless.

Now, the classic take on the sketch is Melville's claim in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" that the seeker after Truth is Hawthorne's own self-portrait, although I wonder whether the person the narrator jokes is "invariably out of place" and who cries in anguish--

"I want my place!--my own place!--my true place in the world!--my proper sphere!--my thing to do, which nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought, all my lifetime! Whether it be a footman's duty, or a king's, is of little consequence, so it be naturally mine."

--might be an ironically distanced sketch of a younger self. Of course, it's also possible to see in the figure of the Recording Spirit himself Hawthorne's own wishes for his art, or to argue that Hawthorne dispersed his own wishes and desires throughout a range of characters, so I'm not sure how productive this line of argument ends up being. The seeker after Truth's comment to the Recording Spirit could well be Hawthorne's commentary on the sketch itself:

"And what are you?" said he. "It will not satisfy me to point to this fantastic show of an Intelligence Office, and this mockery of business. Tell me what is beneath it, and what your real agency in life, and your influence upon mankind?"

So the sketch could just as easily be linked with Hawthorne's exploration of various writer analogues--whether artist or scientist--in his fictions of the 1840s and 1850s, and thus be autobiographical at a remove, in the sense of exploring the functions and powers of literary texts and the roles of authors in the antebellum U.S.

In the end, though, I would emphasize that Hawthorne's idea of the Intelligence Office is connected to the Herald's Office that runs throughout his writings in this same period. I've blogged on heraldry in Hawthorne's and others' fiction a little bit here already, so I won't say too much more right now. But it would be both interesting and informative to explore the ways the Intelligence Office discloses Hawthorne's interests in subjectivity (a la Pfister, Gilmore, Goddu, and others who look at the emergence of the middle class and domestic/affective life in this period) and the Herald's Office in genealogy (a la Bentley, Yellin, Carton, and others who look at the emergence of whiteness and classification schemes/racial sciences in this period).