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Unpredictable Agents: The Making of Japan’s Americanists during the Cold War and Beyond
Ort / Verlag
University of Hawaii Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2021
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
In Unpredictable Agents, twelve Japanese scholars of American
studies tell their stories of how they encountered "America" and
came to dedicate their careers to studying it. People in postwar
Japan have experienced "America" in a number of ways-through
literature, material goods, popular culture, foodways, GIs,
missionaries, art, political figures, celebrities, and business. As
the Japanese public wrestled with a complex mixture of admiration
and confusion, yearning and repulsion, closeness and alienation
toward the US, Japanese scholars specializing in American studies
have become interlocutors in helping their compatriots understand
the country. In scholarly literature, these intellectuals are often
understood as complicit agents in US Cold War liberalism. By
focusing on the human dimensions of the intellectuals' lives and
careers, Unpredictable Agents resists such a deterministic account
of complicity while recognizing the relationship between power and
knowledge and the historical and structural conditions in which
these scholars and their work emerged. How did these scholars
encounter "America" in the first place, and what exactly
constitutes the "America" they have experienced? How did they come
to be Americanists, and what does being Americanists mean for them?
In short, what are the actual experiences of Japan's Americanists,
and what are their relationships to "America"? Reflecting both the
interlocked web of politics, economics, and academics, as well as
the evolving contours of Japan's Americanists, the essays highlight
the diverse paths through which these individuals have come to be
"Americanists" and the complex meanings that identity carries for
them. The stories reveal the obvious yet often neglected fact that
Japanese scholars neither come from the same backgrounds nor occupy
similar identities solely because of their shared ethnicity and
citizenship. The authors were born in the period ranging from the
1940s to the 1980s in different parts of Japan-from Hokkaido to
Okinawa-and raised in diverse familial and cultural environments,
which shaped their identities as "Japanese" and their encounters
with "America" in quite different ways. Together, the essays
illustrate the complex positionalities, fluid identities,
ambivalent embrace, and unpredictable agency of Japan's
Americanists who continue to chart their own course in and across
the Pacific.