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.

Somebody Tell Neil Gaiman

Thanks to the brilliant Bill Benzon, Gojira's telling Tie-Dye Hana Kuma onechan adventure stories over at Mostly Harmless. Reminds me of certain Sandman issues!

P.S.: Somebody (else?) tell me how to get real titles for my posts!

I have no idea why blogger isn't allowing me to enter titles to my posts here and at Mostly Harmless lately, but at least I don't have to decide between "What Does Flannery O'Connor Have to Do with Being a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer?" and "The Life You Change Might Be Your Own." In fact, I'm feeling confident enough about my last JASF lecture that in this quickie post I'll challenge my handful of readers to posit a connection between the above two title options and guess what I talked about last Thursday at the Kyushu Fulbright Alumni Association meeting. Hints in the tags. Well, one. Have fun. Back soon.

Born on the 4th of July...

...was one Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1804. Happy Birthday! I really wonder what you'd make of the state of the union.

[Update 7/9/07: and Ralph Luker didn't note it. For shame! But he did point us to this Joseph Nye piece earlier, so I take that back. By the way, I will return to CitizenSE blogging as soon as I finish my last talk. I have to deliver it Saturday and get it to the translator before then, so hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.]

Whoa! Japanese Defense Minister Resigns Over His A-Bomb Remarks

It turns out the exact same day I was giving my first talk on "Shifting American Images of Japan," Defense Minister and Nagasaki native Fumio Kyuma was in my tsuma's hometown sharing his own views on the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan--views close to the mainstream in the U.S., I would add, with the predictable result that Right Blogistan and the 101st Keyboarders are in Red Alert mode. Of course, in Japan, news of his views prompted a wave of highly critical editorials and other responses, leading him to first apologize for his remarks, then retract them, and later resign from his post.

In other news, President Bush shamelessly stands behind discredited Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and commuted Scooter Libby's sentence.

So far the most interesting analysis I've seen has been from Observing Japan. If you know of other interesting ones (even if you don't agree with them), please let me know. I'm sure I'll be getting questions about this during my talk this coming Saturday!

Let's Start July Off With a Bang: Militarization, Propaganda, and the War in the Pacific

OK, so here's the part of my JASF talk that my audience got most into. Too bad I ran out of time. Ah well, gave me material for the opening of the next talk.

Militarization, Propaganda, and the War in the Pacific
Having emphasized in the prior two sections of this talk the transnational, multiethnic influences on American representations of mid-nineteenth-century Japan and the ways in which American reexaminations of Meiji Japan were at the same time meditations on the state of the U.S. as it entered the twentieth century, respectively, I want to bring these threads together in this final section on the Pacific War in the 1930s and 1940s. Even though Pearl Harbor and the U.S. war effort quickly crystallized American public opinion vehemently against Japan and most anyone of Japanese descent living in the United States during the war, it’s worth remarking how late--into the late 1930s among many elites and even later in popular culture--the Hearn-London debate from the first decade of the century continued to be played out. Two representative figures here are Robert Heinlein and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Heinlein represents the London school of Japanology. Updating for his contemporaries the media-induced Japanese invasion panic of 1907, London’s own writings on Japan and China, and the 1928-1929 Philip Nowland science fiction novel Armageddon 2419 (which inspired such comic strips featuring Asian villains as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Flash Gordon), Heinlein’s 1941 science fiction novel Sixth Column posits an Asian invasion of the United States. This popularized image of a “yellow peril” threatening the United States was not just a prejudice of the masses; in 1924, in a culmination of some 40 years of anti-Asian state and federal legislation, the U.S. passed the most restrictive immigration law in its history, completely excluding emigration from Asia (except for the quasi-colony of the Philippines) and drastically reducing emigration from southern and eastern Europe. With the demographic threat contained by the Johnson-Reed Act, the “yellow peril” shifted toward suspicion of the rising regional power in Asia, Japan.

Du Bois, by contrast, is closer to Hearn. As a host of recent studies--most notably by Vijay Prashad, Marc Gallichio, and Bill Mullen--has unearthed, many prominent African-American intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s looked favorably upon both Taisho and Showa Japan. W.E.B. Du Bois, who during this period developed an innovative socialist critique of racism and colonialism, applauded the Taisho regime’s efforts to codify anti-racism and anti-colonialism in the League of Nations. Given his tendency to excuse the occupation of Korea, perhaps it should come as no surprise that even as the Showa regime leaned more and more toward militarism and expansionism--and even after the staging of the Manchurian Incident--Du Bois continued to hold out hope that the anti-colonial would outweigh the imperial in Japanese international politics. Only after 1937 did Du Bois pin his anti-colonial hopes on China and shift to a critique of Japanese depradations against Chinese civilians.

For different reasons, many U.S elites began to peg American national interests with China over the course of the 1930s, as well. Between the popularity of Pearl Buck’s 1931 novel The Good Earth, outrage at Japanese crimes against humanity with the bombing of Shanghai and the rape of Nanking, and the hope that Chinese nationalists would see the United States as a possible ally in their fight against European and Japanese imperialism, opinion leaders in the U.S. began to quietly agitate for war against Japan.

After years of such efforts, the U.S. public was primed for a nearly unanimous shift in representations of Japan by the U.S. government, media, and entertainment industries following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And indeed, between documentaries like Frank Capra’s series Why We Fight, Hollywood movies like The Purple Heart that focused on Japanese atrocities against American POWs, comic books like Captain America, editorials and editorial cartoons in major newspapers and magazines, and even animated shorts featuring Bugs Bunny and Popeye, whatever debates over and ambivalence in the pre-war American images of Japan were washed away by a wave of anti-Japanese war propaganda.

John Dower has traced a fascinating shift in this propaganda over the course of the war. At first, as the Japanese military was winning battle after battle, American propagandists labored to convince the American public to take the threat from Japan seriously and to give up their stereotypes of the Japanese as small, harmless, incompetent, and even ludicrous when it came to fighting with modern weapons of war. Next, as the bloodiness of the battles and difficulty of seeing a way to victory became apparent, propagandists shifted to producing and questioning images of Japanese as super-soldiers. The sneaky, back-stabbing monkey images used to symbolize Japanese soldiers during the first year of the war were transformed into images of gigantic, powerful, rampaging apes, for instance. Then, as the tide of battle turned in the U.S.’s favor, images of Japanese as vermin to be exterminated began to appear, followed by a return to the mocking, parodic images from the first weeks of the war.

Christina Jarvis has updated and expanded Dower’s work to focus on how the image of war-time allies, such as Chinese and Filipino peoples, became rehabilitated during the war. During the 1930s, for instance, Filipino farm laborers in the American west were often bitterly discriminated against and attacked, as documented in Carlos Bulosan’s autobiography, America Is in the Heart. But once their compatriots were seen as the victims of Japanese imperialism in need of rescue by the U.S. military, attitudes toward diasporic Filipinos in the U.S. shifted, as well. The case of China is even more dramatic, as these scenes from The Battle of China, one of the last films in the Why We Fight series, demonstrate.

The work of Dower, Jarvis, and other historians of American war propaganda raise controversial questions that scholars of the aerial bombing campaigns and of the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have also considered. What role did this propaganda play in the decision to bomb civilian populations and dozens of major Japanese cities? Dower analyzes how American propagandists manipulated Japanese war propaganda, turning positives from the Showa regime’s perspective into negatives for the American public’s consumption; this suggests a degree of self-consciousness about the construction and orchestration of images of and from Japan. But did American war planners come to believe their own propaganda that the Japanese people were fanatically devoted to the Emperor, who was a tool of military elites, and needed to be shocked and awed out of their self-destructive reverence? Or after pushing for years for total and unconditional surrender of the Japanese government and sowing the seeds of racialized hatred of the Japanese people, were they constrained by the public opinion they helped cultivate? Over the past several decades, historians have debated the strategic, military, technical, scientific aspects of the American air campaign and the timing of the use of atomic weaponry, considering the full range of alternatives open to U.S. war planners. What a study of the first century of American representations of Japan can bring to the foreground is the relative role played by wartime stereotype, myth, discourse, ideology, and propaganda in the framing and sifting of alternatives. Even if we accept arguments that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to hasten the war and save American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Kyushu--the traditional view--or instead that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were meant as object lessons for the Soviet Union--the most controversial rival interpretation--it still is worth emphasizing that in either case the lives of Japanese civilians must have been construed as acceptable losses (as indeed they must during the entire incendiary bombing campaign of Japanese cities). Surely war hates and racism played a significant role in this calculation, even if (or especially if) it was done unthinkingly.

What actually took so long was setting up and analyzing my examples. Next talk: more examples!

White-Blindness

In honor of BitchPhD's brilliant and impassioned takedown of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts's "reasoning" while explaining why the Court struck down some voluntary desegregation plans, I'll direct my handful of loyal readers and googlers lost in blogoramaville to my mid-'90s pre-blog graduate-student web-rant on whiteness, which was reprinted in slightly different form as "White-Blindness" in the 1998 and 2005 editions of The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States (and which I last updated in 2005 to bring a few personal references up to date).

[Update: For more on race, you must check out Daniel Gall's plans for Hug the Shoggoth. If this isn't on your blogroll, it should be!]

Special bonus for those too lazy to click, here's my now-dated-yet-still-sadly-relevant piece, with dead links restored thanks to the Internet Archive and a few extra comments and sources thrown in for fun:

If you're coming from my OJ Page, you're probably wondering why I highlighted "white." I'll try to make the explanation brief and make it make sense even if you haven't come from there, and get on to the point of this page.

Why should it matter that I'm white in my opinion over OJ's guilt or innocence? What does my being white have to do with considering the evidence and making a decision? In short, what does race have to do with issues of evaluation, judgment, or epistemology? Hasn't the notion of race itself been shown to be incoherent, self-contradictory, fallacious, without basis in scientific fact or religious doctrine? So what influence can an illusion have on people or their habits of mind?

Well, I suspect that most people would say that the answers are simple: it shouldn't matter, it shouldn't have anything to do with it, nothing,　yes, and nothing. But I'm not so sure the answers to these questions are at all simple (and I have a sneaking suspicion that "most people" really means "most white people"). I certainly understand and feel the appeal　that the utopic vision of color-blindness underlying these questions and answers has, given the horrible history that race-thinking has been such a constitutive part of in modernity, from the slave trade and slavery to　genocide to ethnic cleansing. But I want to question the assumption that if we stop noticing race, if we stop talking about race, if we stop thinking of ourselves as belonging to any race but the human, then the system of racial oppression that those who have identified themselves as white have established will simply go away. I want to question the assumption that to "stop" doing any of these things is a simple and easy process. I want to question the assumption so endemic to "color-blind" thinking on race that the best way to fight racism is to attack the notion of race by showing it to be a cognitive error.

You can see, then, that I fully subscribe to the insight of the social construction of race, but that I do not conflate the idea of "social construction" with the notion of "fallacy" or "cognitive error" or "illusion." I prefer to think the idea of social construction through the lens of such concepts as "ideology," "narrative" and "public fantasy." (But more on that elsewhere.) Thus I can fully agree that I am not "essentially" white (particularly because, as Karen Sacks and Sander Gilman have shown, Jews became white in the New World; David Roediger, Theodore Allen, and Noel Ignatiev have made similar arguments on behalf of Irish immigrants to the U.S. in the nineteenth century--for cites, see below), but at the same time I can not ignore, downplay, or dismiss the privilege being positioned as white tends to bestow, and not only in this country. Nor can I simply assume that how I've been positioned in and by U.S. race discourses and formations has nothing to do with how I experience or reflect upon the world.

So let me pose an alternative set of questions that will bring out why I think my being white has a lot to do with how I understand the OJ case: How does my self-perception and self-identification as "white" (as well as perceptions and identifications by others) affect my perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and judgments, not to mention my life chances? What does thinking of myself as "white" enable me to recognize or cause me to gloss over or elide? What relation does my "whiteness" have to other aspects of my "identity"--class, gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliations, order and area of birth, and on and on to even less obvious ones like the enjoyment I get out of watching The Tick, Daria, South Park, The Simpsons, Dr. Katz, Beavis and Butt-head, and, well, just about anything on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim)?

Here's why I think these questions are better than the first three above. For one thing, those questions take for granted as natural and eternal the existence of "the white race." I would counter that this concept is of relatively recent origin, and that thinking of whiteness or race as some simple biological fact is a mistake. I discuss why this is so at length in my race page, so I'll just say it again briefly here. When I say that it matters that I'm white in how I view the OJ case, I don't mean that my whiteness is this accident of birth that has locked me into an inability to understand people of "other races" ("it's a white thing, I can't understand"). Rather, I mean that being treated as white throughout my entire life (along with a whole range of other socially significant categories--male, middle class, short, Jewish, from upstate NY [no, not just north of NYC--the real thing!], and so on) has contributed toward shaping my habits of mind and emotions, including what I tend to take for granted and my gut reactions, my attitudes toward the police, crime, authority, and the law, where I've lived, who I hang with and am close to, and so on. What I'm saying is that "being white" is a learned phenomenon, and until I started thinking about what kinds of lessons I was learning (usually after a friend took the time to call me out on something), I didn't even recognize that I was being taught, much less question the value of the lessons I had been learning.

For another thing, the first three questions above assume that color-blindness is always in and of itself a good thing. But think about that word. When you are color-blind, you only see in black and white, right? (Well, not exactly, they tell me I'm red/green color blind, although I can almost always tell them apart in real-life situations; still, I don't play those damn orange golf balls! But you can see the point here, right?) Isn't that counter-productive? Doesn't it actually reduce the question of race--the experience of living in a thoroughly racialized society--to a binary, instead of opening it up for interrogation? I can go on with this line of argument (the problems you run into when you reduce the complex history of race discourse, racial formations, and racial oppression to the realms of color, vision, and perception, particularly if you are committed to an anti-racist agenda that amounts to more than diversity management), but let's for the moment take this kind of "I treat people as people" position charitably. I submit that if you are truly committed to color-blindness, then your task shouldn't be to go around lecturing to all those (usually people of color) who are still caught in the grips of race-consciousness, but instead to make the case to whites of the necessity of color-blindness, that is, the recognition and rejection of white racial privilege. (For a less charitable take on "color blindness"--not to mention the first serious response to these comments of mine to date--check out Nkenge Maideyi Zenzele's "The Problem with Color Blindness".)

For those to whom this way of thinking is new, I would like to recommend a few works that were crucial in advancing the discussion and analysis of "whiteness" and "the white race" and which are indispensable today:

• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (especially the opening first few pages and the last chapter, but it runs throughout this 1903 book);
  
• W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Souls of White Folk," in his mid-'20s essay collection, Darkwater;
  
• W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (a thick tome from the 1930s that challenges the then-popular racist interpretations of the Reconstruction era [1865-1877], but still a classic, and the source of the "wages of whiteness" thesis);
  
• W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (this 1940 autobiography/history of the pre-WW II era is still not often cited in discussions of Du Bois's career, but it is an absolutely crucial text for so many reasons, including an imagined discussion with a white friend in the middle of the book);
  
• Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (largely ignored by whites in the academy in the 1950s, this is now the bible of the "race and American literature and culture" movement; see also "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks" in Going to the Territory for an update of his ideas, and of course read his novel Invisible Man if you haven't already);
  
• Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (don't believe the hype that puts him as the black demon to Martin Luther King's black angel; read this for yourself--he's one of the best at exposing white supremacy, not only as it worked in the past, but how it is working in the present as well);
  
• Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (a major collection of short and accessible essays that problematize the whiteness of the '70s women's movement and put racism squarely on the table in a challenging and constructive manner);
  
• James Baldwin, "On Being White . . . and Other Lies," in Essence (from 1984; good, short, accessible);
• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (very recent but very influential book on the literary construction of blackness and whiteness, and of course don't forget to read all her novels and the less well-known essay collections she's edited--on the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas and OJ Simpson spectacles);
  
• bell hooks, "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination" (in the collection Cultural Studies and elsewhere);
  
• Patricia Williams, "The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness," in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano;
  
• Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind (excellent historical study that is a response to hooks's and others' work, including George Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind).
  

The reason I cite these classics along with the more recent African Americanist work on whiteness is that any exploration of whiteness today is practically worthless if it doesn't engage, question, and respond to them. People of color have had to figure out white people and survive under white supremacy for centuries. These works represent the tip of the iceberg of black thinking on whiteness. Check out collections like Home Girls, This Bridge Called My Back, ...But Some of Us Are Brave, Homegirls, Haciendo Caras: Making Face/Making Soul, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Criticism in the Borderlands, The Ethnic Canon, Mapping Multiculturalism, Race Consciousness, and The House that Race Built for a slightly larger (and broader) portion of the iceberg.

This is not the place to go into my full response to the important work of a journal like Race Traitor or David Roediger's Towards the Abolition of Whiteness or Ian Haney Lopez's White by Law, but I can at least recommend these and other works on the history and politics of whiteness (in no particular order, with no attempt at completeness, and perpetually [if rather belatedly] under construction):

• David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Towards the Abolition of Whiteness ; Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White
  
• Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
  
• Richard Dyer, "White," Screen 29.1 (Winter 1988); White
  
• Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic
  
• Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberle Crenshaw, et al.
  
• Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor
  
• Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale
  
• Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters
  
• Eric Lott, Love and Theft
  
• Karen Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Race, eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek
  
• Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race
  
• Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; ed., Race Traitor
  
• Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism
  
• Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law
  
• George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
  
• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color
  

You might also check out the following links:

• Whiteness Studies, Gregory Jay, University of Wisconsin
  
• Overview of "White" Talk Today by Howard Winant
  
• Articles and essays on race, racism, and white privilege, Robert Jensen, University of Texas at Austin
  
• Race Traitor
  
• WhitePrivilege.com
  
• Colours of Resistance
  
• Something I Wrote Awhile Ago on Affirmative Action
  
• My Spring 2005 Introduction to Ethnicity/Race Course at SUNY Fredonia