Imagining “America” across the Pacific: Interlacing American and Japanese Cartographies

This paper investigates Japanese wartime propaganda activities that targeted African Americans by focusing on two Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports, “War and Blacks” (1942) and “Wartime Black Propaganda Operations” (1943). “War and Blacks,” written by African Americans sympathizer turned government agent Yasuichi Hikida, provided the Japanese government with up-to-date information on the status of African Americans, particularly on their wartime frustration over mob violence and racism. Convinced of the effectiveness of racial agitation among blacks, the Japanese government assigned Hikida to another report on African Americans, but this time, more precisely on wartime espionage. Believing that black antipathy to domestic racism would become a major obstacle for America’s ongoing war for democracy, “Wartime Black Propaganda Operations” detailed plans on conducting propaganda activities aimed at African Americans in the US and abroad. By examining these reports, related FBI documents, and black-oriented newspapers and periodicals, the paper will demonstrate how Japanese propaganda campaigns emphasized hypocrisy of American democracy, the same rhetoric African Americans highlighted on the home front, to justify Japan’s war to liberate the colored races from Western colonialism.

This study considers how jazz music was used in U.S. public diplomacy in postwar Japan, focusing on jazz record concerts at Osaka CIE Information Center (1948-1952) and its successor, Osaka American Culture Center (1952-1972). The idea of jazz music being a symbol of American democracy became very popular during the Cold War, and by the late 1950s the State Department began funding goodwill tours of American jazz musicians to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. One may expect, then, that jazz would have been vigorously promoted in postwar Japan as well by the U.S. occupation authority and subsequently by the public diplomacy sector. My findings, however, suggest that Americans were not specifically interested in promoting jazz music in Japan, while they did try to introduce more American composers and orchestras in classical music to the Japanese. Based on official weekly reports at the Osaka Information Center / American Culture Center, memoirs of former employees, as well as the LP records, hand-made programs, and other memorabilia preserved by a former employee, I will argue that the Japanese interest in jazz and popular music was largely spontaneous.

In 1970, some 30 young people in their twenties gathered in Sado Island in Niigata, Japan, to form a group to study traditional Japanese folklore, dance and music. A decade later, they became an internationally renowned Taiko drumming group, KODO. This paper examines the motives and reasons for the Japanese youths who formed Taiko groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and elucidates how their apparently non-political cultural activities were founded in their deep questioning of the “American value-system.” KODO members sought a simple and stoic communal life as an alternative to the rapid Americanization of general Japanese lifestyles. While the majority of Taiko groups advocated nationalistic traditionalism and the majority of leftist youth activists embraced Jazz, KODO drummers sought cultural nationalism and spiritual cosmopolitanism at the same time. This case study seeks to overcome the dichotomy of “nationalism” and “transnationalism” and that of “political anti-Americanism” and “non-political anti-Americanism” through a careful analysis of Japanese cultural activism from the right and the left, and seeks a hint for critical cosmopolitanism and alternative sense of belonging at this time of rapid Americanization of the global world.

From a perspective of studying how karate, a popular martial art that originated in Okinawa and developed in Japan, is imagined and consumed in the United States, this paper studies various karate schools in the United States. Along with television, movie, and publication media, there is abundant information on the Internet about this once secretive, undocumented art that originated from a foreign culture. The survey of the karate school websites and scenes of karate that appear on television and other media prominently feature “belts” worn by karate practitioners as a popular image of karate as accepted among the public, and for American karate students, it works as a major device to create a unique space that attracts people to develop body & mind as a major perceived benefit of karate practice. The mental aspect, in relation to the influence of Asian spiritual elements, and how karate’s tradition is consumed on the foreign soil were examined further. In the end, the Americans have created its own karate as a mixture of Japanese and/or Okinawan traditions, other Asian arts, and practical combat techniques and attached their own authenticity.