scholarly journals Dressed to Cross: Narratives of Resistance and Integration in Sei Shônagon's The Pillow Book and Yone Noguchi's The American Diary of a Japanese Girl

2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-198
Author(s):  
Ina Christiane Seethaler
Keyword(s):  
Morning Glory ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
National Space ◽  
Heian Period ◽  
Japanese Immigrants ◽  
Personal Crisis ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Class Borders ◽  
The U.S

The Pillow Book by Sei Shônagon, Empress Sadako's lady in waiting from about 993-1000, offers rich detail about the meaning and power of dress during the Heian period [794-1185]. Throughout Yone Noguchi's novel The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902), Morning Glory, a newly arrived Japanese immigrant to the U.S., experiments with a multitude of different identities through clothes. Both narratives appropriate (cross-) dressing as a means of overcoming gender, cultural, and class borders. Shônagon and Noguchi engage in “authorial crossdressing” to inhabit a social, cultural, and national space onto which they only have a precarious hold. It is especially the portrayal of what Marjorie Garber has delineated as a “category crisis” that links Japanese medieval writing and early fictional accounts by Japanese American authors. This article demonstrates that cross-dressing originates in moments of personal crisis and that its practice is sustained by the anxiety of cultural dislocation. The parallel identified between The Pillow Book and The American Diary—both texts largely ignored by academia—promises to clarify further early Japanese immigrants' experimentation with their bodies, citizenship, and other markers of identity to create a Japanese American subjectivity.

“Filipinos are the Dandies of the Foreign Colonies”: Race, Labor Struggles, and the Transpacific Routes of Hollywood and Philippine Films, 1924–1948

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-403
Author(s):  
Denise Khor
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Movie Theaters ◽  
Japanese Immigrants ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western City ◽  
Urban Leisure ◽  
The U.S

In the 1930s and 1940s Filipino laborers, many of whom were en route to agricultural hubs on the Pacific Coast, packed into movie theaters owned by Japanese immigrants to view Hollywood and Philippine-produced films. These cultural encounters formed an urban public sphere that connected both sides of the Pacific. Filipino patrons remade their public identities and communities through their consumption of film and urban leisure in the western city. This article traces this localized history of spectatorship and exhibition in order to reconsider prevailing understandings of the history of the U.S. West and the rise of cinema and mass commercial culture in the early twentieth century.

Americanization and Beika

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuko Matsumoto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
World War ◽  
Full Membership ◽  
Japanese Immigrants ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Gendered Stereotypes ◽  
The U.S

The Americanization movement in the early twentieth century tried to redefine the qualifications for full membership within the nation. In the same period, the anti-Asian movement flourished. Responding actively to the discourses of anti-Japanese (and Asian) movements, Japanese immigrants tried to prove their eligibility for full membership in the U.S. nation by following their own interpretation of Americanization, or Beika (米化‎) in Japanese. The ideas of Beika were based on idealized Japanese virtues, as well as on what was required by the Americanization movement. Even though they used the parallel terms in ideas of Beika, however, the gender discourses such as virtues of Yamatonadeshiko and the definition of family highlighted the difference between the views of Americanization and those of Beika despite their similar intention. This gap in perception might have reinforced the racialized and gendered stereotypes on both sides and hindered mutual understanding before World War II.

Suburb, Network, Homeland: National Space and the Rhetoric of Broadcasting

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Giles
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Don Delillo ◽  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Voice Of America ◽  
National Space ◽  
Television Service ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines how the landscape of American broadcasting in the second half of the twentieth century evolved from a situation in which values of liberal independence acted as a front for the sway of network corporations to one in which the incremental fragmentation of the increasingly global media market posed a challenge to the rhetoric of national space. It considers how the spatial dynamics inherent within American culture have been represented in American writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo, and contrasts this with the perspectives of a younger generation, in particular those of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. It explains how the “Voice of America” (VOA), the official radio and television service of the U.S. federal government, became “the nation's ideological arm of anti-communism,” while the minds of supposedly free-thinking citizens at home were also shaped surreptitiously by the new power of electronic media.

"Incontestable Proof Will Be Exacted": Historians, Asian Americans, and the Medal of Honor

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
James C. McNaughton ◽  
Kristen E. Edwards ◽  
Jay M. Price
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
The U.S

For more than a century the Medal of Honor has served as a revered symbol of valor and service to the nation. In the 1990s Japanese American veterans requested a review of their service in World War II to determine whether the U.S. Army has overlooked any of their number for the award. In 1996 a team of historians began a review of all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who fought in that war. Their work resulted in the award of twenty-two new Medals of Honor in June 2000. The review was also a revealing journey into the challenges of amending public memory.

The Imamura Families and the Making of American Buddhism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michihiro Ama
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Japanese Immigrants ◽  
American Buddhism ◽  
Imperial Japan ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Japanese Descent

The Imamura families primarily refer to Emyō Imamura (1867–1932) and Kanmo Imamura (1904–1986), who each made great contributions to “American Buddhism.” Although a definition of American Buddhism is open to discussion, it began to develop at the turn of the 20th century because of the efforts of Euro-American Buddhist converts and ethnic Buddhists. While serving the Nikkei (persons of Japanese descent) Shin Buddhist community in Hawaii, Emyō introduced Buddhism to a group of Euro-Americans and a member of the royal Hawaiian family. Emyō maintained traditional Japanese temple practices and the political ideology of imperial Japan for the Issei (the first generation, referring to Japanese immigrants), emphasized Buddhist education for the Nisei (the second generation, referring to the children of the Japanese immigrants), and created a Nisei ministry program. He related Buddhist egalitarianism to American democracy and pluralism, which allowed him, together with his congregation, to oppose discriminatory and oppressive policies of the then territory of Hawaii. Emyō defined Buddhism as a form of cosmopolitan religion and spread the universal aspect of Shin Buddhist doctrine. For him, creating American Buddhism was inseparable from redefining Shin Buddhism. Emyō Imamura’s progressive Buddhist vision and conservative Buddhist practices were supported by his family. His wife, Kiyoko Hino Imamura (1884–1962), helped him in his ministerial duties and led the largest association of Buddhist women in Hawaii. Their first son, Kanmo Imamura, served a Buddhist community in Berkeley, California, and promoted the interaction between Japanese American Buddhists and Euro-American Buddhist converts in the Bay Area during the 1950s and 1960s. Kanmo was greatly supported by his wife, Jane Matsumura Imamura (1920–2011). The Buddhist propagation of Emyō and Kanmo exemplified the practice of a Shin Buddhist temple family by which husband and wife work together to promote Shinran’s teaching and the father is succeeded by the first son. At the same time, their efforts created a tension between a sectarian form of Buddhism that persons of Japanese descent practiced in America and a Universal Buddhism that Euro-American Buddhist converts sought. As leaders of the largest ethnic Buddhist organizations in the United States, Emyō and Kanmo responded to the needs of fellow immigrants and Japanese American Buddhists and Euro-American Buddhist converts and sympathizers. The demand of Euro-American Buddhists, together with the strong presence of Christianity and the sociopolitical conditions in the United States at the time, caused Emyō and Kanmo to maintain, redefine, and transform Shin Buddhist practice.

A Queer Redemption

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Marisa Escolar
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
The Novel ◽  
National Space ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Queer Spaces ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The U.S

Chapter 4 examines how the conventional gendering and sexualization of redemption is revised in John Horne Burns’s internationally beloved novel The Gallery (1947) as Naples—long described in terms of “porosity”—becomes a queer, trans-national space. The Gallery rejects the heteronormative encounter culminating in reproduction, dismissing it as the basis of a nationalistic egotism that lays the groundwork for war. Instead, the novel favors a momentary communion between Allies and Italians as the Dantean narrator’s rebirth culminates in an orgasmic encounter with a genderless Italian. Moreover, I show how the narrator’s redemption depends on a trans-national dimension that crisscrosses the Mediterranean, moving between the U.S., North Africa, and Naples, and a metonymic slippage between the Galleria Umberto I, Naples, Italy, and the universe. As it dehistoricizes Naples versus colonial Africa and materialist America, The Gallery erases all local identities, including the queer spaces and bodies that preface his redemption.

Japanese Americans in Academia and Political Discourse in Japan

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Okiyoshi Takeda
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The U.S

I am a political scientist specializing in Asian American politics. Although I earned my PhD in the United States, my initial interest was in the U.S. Congress and not in Japanese American studies or Asian American studies. What shifted my interest toward Asian American studies was that I had witnessed firsthand a campus sit-in at the Princeton University president’s office, where students were fighting for the establishment of an Asian American studies program. Witnessing such an incident, I realized that Asian Americans were an understudied topic in the field of political science. There is also a tendency for scholars from Japan to focus exclusively on Japanese Americans and to disregard other Asian American ethnic groups. Since I did not start out my study on Asian Americans in a graduate school in Japan with an interest in Japanese Americans, I have been able to avoid taking that kind of path....

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