Товч агуулга:This year’s Japanese Journal of American Studies features “Memory” as its special topic, a topic selected by the journal’s editorial committee in 2016. Most of the articles published in the Japanese Journal of American Studies, including those from back issues, are freely available on the Internet (http://www.jaas.gr.jp).
The first three articles examine memory through literature. Michiko Shimokobe’s “Inland/Oceanic Imagination in Melville’s Redburn” examines, through Herman Melville’s fourth novel, Redburn (1849), the political climate in which the United States “expanded” in North America and across the Atlantic Ocean. In “De-Occidentalized ‘Projections in the Haiku Manner,’” Michio Arimitsu analyzes the influence of Japanese haiku on the poems of Richard Wright (1908-60) shortly before Wright’s untimely
death; Arimitsu takes a fresh look at Wright’s struggle with the memory of white supremacy and the colonization of the mind among the colonized.
Finally, Tsuyoshi Ishihara’s “Memory of American Classics” examines how and why Mark Twain and his works were taken up in American secondary school–level literature textbooks of the 1930s and 1940s.
The last three articles examine memory through history. In her “Gila River Concentration Camp and the Historical Memory of Japanese American Mass Incarceration,” Masumi Izumi argues the need to modify our interpretation of notions such as gaman and shikataganai, terms commonly understood as denoting submission to racial injustice by Issei (first-generation Japanese Americans). Izumi’s article also examines works by Issei women in their serial newspaper column, Fujin no Sekai (Woman’s
world), which served the moral uplift and collective survival of incarcerated Japanese Americans. Akiko Ochiai takes up another memory of racial injustice in her article, “A ‘New Integration’ of Memory in the National Museum of African American History and Culture.” In looking at the museum’s exhibits, Ochiai examines the delicate balance between African American experience and Americanism, as well as the areas of morality and entertainment. Finally, Yoshie Takamitsu, by focusing on the activities of the American media mogul Roy Howard, the Japanese news agency Dentsu, and
the Osaka Mainichi in “Improving US–Japanese Relations through the News Media” provides insight into the failure of Japanese public diplomacy toward the United States in the years following the mid-1930s.
