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ASA-JAAS
ASA-JAAS Delegate Report 1998
I. GARY OKIHIRO
My visit to Japan was overall a wonderfully enriching experience. The arrangements overall (and these were quite complicated) were managed with care and were excellent, my varied venues in terms of places and audiences helped me learn about American Studies in Japan and in different contexts, and many of my contacts renewed friendships and initiated new relationships. I can not thank enough Hiroko Sato, coordinator of our visit and now JAAS president, the JAAS members who hosted us and made us feel at home, the USIS officers who planned my (and Mary Helen’s) Okinawa visit and my lecture to the Asian American Literature Society at Kobe Women’s University, and my many friends and colleagues who welcomed me. I thought the visit was spectacularly successful.
Mary Helen and I received a helpful briefing by USIS staff at the Tokyo U.S. embassy at the start of our visit. Two colleagues then escorted the entire group, by taxi and then by train to the JAAS conference site in Chiba. That evening’s reception with JAAS officers was cordial and sumptuous. Mary Helen delivered her presidential address to JAAS the first day of the conference, and I, along with the delegation’s remainder, delivered papers the following day. Because much of the meeting was held in Japanese, the delegation only attended their sessions and the few that were held in English. (I do not believe that to be detrimental to the idea of engagement, because as some of my Japanese colleagues explained, this was their sole meeting to get together as American Studies scholars and hence needed to engage one another foremost. And because scholarship is best conducted in the scholars’ language, I see no reason why JAAS scholars must accommodate visiting American or Korean scholars by speaking in English.) I participated in a Japanese-language forum on Asian American Studies during the JAAS meeting. The room was filled, and enthusiasm for the subject matter was keen. All of the papers presented by the ASA delegates received high marks judging from the questions they generated in the question and answer period and at the reception that closed the conference. Receptions, by the way, were an excellent means to acquire free nutrition and to have more intimate talks with our Japanese colleagues. I met many during those gatherings.
A suggestion for future relations at the JAAS meetings is to have, perhaps in lieu of formal papers by ASA delegates, seminars involving ASA delegates and JAAS members around questions of respective traditions, methodologies, subject matters, and theoretical orientations. I believe these less structured engagements, if focussed on our different traditions of American Studies, will foster much greater understanding, and advance scholarship between both groups. The Korean delegates should be added to this mix for yet another point of view. Having attended both the American Studies meetings in Korea and Japan, I feel some disappointment in not have more lateral exchanges (as opposed to Americans lecturing our Asian hosts) that show mutual respect and engender deeper cross-cultural understandings. (I have relayed that thought to Hiroko Sato, JAAS’s new president.)
My lecture at Tokyo University, held the day after the JAAS meeting in Chiba, was a highlight of my tour. Besides renewing old friendships, I spoke to a packed room of faculty and graduate students who shared an interest in American and Asian American Studies. Many in that room were familiar with my books, and the discussion was electric, I thought, over the issue of American Studies’s relations with Ethnic Studies. I found my Japanese colleagues well attuned to many of the nuances and politics surrounding the topic.
An entirely different (and thus wonderful) venue was my lecture to about fifty undergraduates at International Christian University just outside of Tokyo. A friend, Naoki Onishi, who is also an active JAAS member, sponsored the lecture. Here, the talk was about Asian American Studies, and the undergraduates listened well and asked stimulating questions. I got an entirely different sense of American Studies in Japan from this visit to a private university and chatting with undergraduates (and two graduate students) at that campus.
Masahiro Nakano, our host in Kyoto, was exceedingly accommodating and helpful. Besides acting as tour guide (a job, in my opinion, far above and beyond any expectation), Professor Nakano was a gracious educator of Japanese culture and history to our group. We scrapped our planned talk at Ritsumeikan University (our hosts were gracious and accommodating here), and instead of giving mini-lectures from our JAAS papers, we gave off-the-cuff renderings of personal views of American Studies. These were brief (about five minutes each), and we left much time for the gathered graduate students and faculty to introduce themselves and state their interests in American Studies. The subsequent introductions opened the students to a candid discussion of all sorts of issues in American Studies that concerned them and we had the most animated of engagements experienced by the delegation. Even the Korean scholars opened themselves to a critique of some of our (ASA delegates) presentations. Only time cut that productive discussion, which continued during the reception that followed.
Okinawa held special meaning to me because my maternal grandparents were born there and because it was my first visit to those islands. Mary Helen and I delivered lectures to a mixed audience of faculty and mainly graduate students in American Studies. We were keen to learn about this different brand of American Studies (at variance with mainland Japanese programs) because of its stress upon minority studies (Okinawa having been colonized by the U.S. and Japan). The dinner that followed was enriching because of closer chat with our Okinawan colleagues. One of their members, Shojun Kakinohana, a professor of law, took me the next day to the birthplace of both my maternal grandparents and to a meeting with my relatives. He had been moved, he said, by my lecture on autobiography and history. I am indebted to him for his kindness.
My final lecture was delivered before the Asian American Literature Society in Kobe before an audience of faculty and a few students. Besides faculty from the Kobe and Kansai area, faculty from Kyoto, Tokyo, and even north of Tokyo came to this lecture sponsored by the Society and USIS. Here, the talk was sophisticated because most of the faculty were well versed in the subject matter and many were well acquainted with my books. The dinner following was warm and collegial. Although ill, my host Teruyo Ueki was terrifically accommodating and her assistant, Hideyuki Yamamoto from nearby Kobe University, was a peerless guide.
My hectic itinerary and complicated transportation (via taxi, train, plane, jetfoil boat, and on foot) were so well arranged they all went off without a single hitch. Tickets were bought, rooms reserved, hosts arranged all to my liking, indeed gratification. I was amazed by and so thankful for the smooth flow of my movement from Tokyo to Okinawa.
The most positive thing to evolve from this visit, I hold, were the contacts made that have become actualized into working relations that will no doubt continue into the future. Several people asked me for information—all of which I’ve sent. Several colleagues have expressed an interest in translating my books into Japanese for a wider distribution in Japan. I will join Naoki Onishi in a history project that should last for several years. I have been invited to teach at Kobe University and to visit a cluster of universities just outside of Tokyo. Finally, I am exploring a formal connection between Japanese Asian Americanists and U.S. Asian Americanists. The link appears promising.
I hope JAAS and ASA continue this exchange, with minor modifications for improvement that benefit both fields of study and individual scholars in both countries. Oh yes, I have been in contact with graduate students who want to continue their graduate education in American Studies in the U.S. Students, too, are benefiting from this splendid program.
II. HERMAN GRAY
My trip to Japan was a terrific success. In no small measure this success owed to the composition, collegiality, and complementarity of the research interests among the members of the US American Studies delegation. The success of the trip also reflected the tireless efforts of our Japanese hosts and the warm reception and stimulating exchanges that our delegation received from Japanese scholars and students. In particular I would especially note the efforts of Professor Sato (and her staff) at JAAS, Professor Fumiko Fujita of Tsuda College, and Professor Nakano of Ritsumeikan University.
While in Japan I made three major presentations—a paper at the annual JAAS meetings held at Chiba University, a lecture at Tsuda College, and a presentation at Ritsumeikan University. Of these, the panel presentation at JAAS was the most conventional, but only in the sense that it offered the least opportunity for sustained interaction and exchange with Japanese scholars and students. Since most of the sessions at JAAS were conducted in Japanese, there were limited opportunities for us to actually participate in the regular sessions. Since JAAS meetings offer one of the few opportunities for Japanese scholars in American Studies to actually convene in order to share their research, it is unrealistic to expect that the association’s major meeting would be designed to accommodate an American delegation. The evening receptions at the JAAS did provide an opportunity for us to engage with Japanese scholars and students in less formal and more extended exchanges. During these more informal conversations I did have the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with many Japanese scholars including a sociologist—Professor Kaoru Kurosawa of Chiba University—who graciously extended himself by offering to help facilitate future visits to Chiba University.
One of the highlights of the visit, for me personally, was the opportunity to give a lecture at Tsuda College in Tokyo. Located in suburban Tokyo, Tsuda College is one of the oldest and most prestigious women’s colleges in Japan. The audience for the lecture was comprised of upper division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. My presentation focused on popular culture, particularly jazz and visual culture, to illustrate the role of culture in projects of social transformation. At Tsuda I found that while the vast majority of undergraduates were not particularly knowledgeable or conversant about jazz, they were attentive, enthusiastic, and in a few cases very eager and interested to pursue with me some of the insights and examples mentioned in my talk. In addition to my formal lecture at Tsuda College I did have an occasion to talk rather extensively with Professors Fujita of the History Department and Tsubaki of the English Department. Professors Fujita and Tsubaki also organized a small group of graduate students (one of whom traveled some two hours by train to attend the talk) with whom I had a very productive and stimulating session. My special thanks to Professors Fujita as well for providing the best student guide I could have hoped for.
Finally, I would count the seminar and discussion at Ritsumeikan University as among the most rewarding and stimulating of the entire trip. I say this because I found our sessions there among the few occasions where as a delegation we actually got the opportunity to listen and exchange ideas with faculty and students for an extended period.
This exchange was especially rewarding (and memorable) for me because it gave me the opportunity to actually learn more about the intellectual ideas and research of Japanese scholars and students. As a delegation we presented short comments on the JAAS theme and then we invited comments from members of the seminar. This format led to stimulating exchanges that, with the exception of the small discussion setting I had at Tsuda College, were not possible at the JAAS meetings. At the reception afterward many of us continued discussions began in the seminar. In each case I gained some insight about the status of American Studies as an intellectual practice in Japan, how it travels beyond the US, and its complex relationship to the national projects of the construction of America and Japan. In my estimation, the success of this session rests both with the receptivity of the Japanese scholars and students to entering into a dialogue and the collegiality of the US (and Korean) delegations (especially our willingness as a collectivity to be self-reflexive and flexible in our presentation and format). In addition to the genuine collegiality and cooperative spirit in our delegation, President Mary Helen Washington and members of the Korean delegation (Professors Koo and Kim) deserve enormous credit for making this session memorable and productive.
Along with these intellectual and professional experiences and impressions, I would note that every aspect of our local arrangements and reception—accommodation, transportation, tours, and general welcome—were excellent. In every respect I felt a very genuine and warm welcome. All of my personal and professional needs were attended to with care. For example, when my hosts at Tsuda College learned that my talk would include comments about the Lincoln Center Jazz Program and its director Wynton Marsalis, they took it upon themselves to locate a videotape of Marsalis (recorded the night before my presentation). Professor Nakano also graciously accommodated my late request for a VCR playback machine and made it available for our seminar session. I am eternally grateful for these small efforts. They made a difference in the quality of my presentation at Tsuda College.
I have very few recommendations, but two rather modest suggestions do come to mind. First, is to build in a bit more flexibility in the schedule so that visiting scholars can have more of an opportunity to experience Japan. Because my time was so tightly scheduled I left Tokyo with very little sense of the city as a place. As one who studies popular culture and urban spaces one of my disappointments was that I was unable to directly learn about and to get a stronger appreciation of this aspect of Japanese society. Second, I would recommend that lecture and presentations be structured so that American scholars might have more opportunity to engage in sustained exchanges (especially listening and learning) with our Japanese colleagues. Had the delegation not decided among ourselves that the seminar at Ritsumeikan University represented an opportunity to hear from the faculty and students, we might have otherwise missed a wonderful chance to learn more about the discourses, debates, tensions, issues, and research in which our Japanese colleagues are engaged particularly as it concerns the travels and reception of American studies. Indeed thinking about this complex intellectual relationship, (that is, the mutual and constitutive influences) of America and Japan on the production of American studies globally was one of the most intellectually rewarding aspects of the trip.
III. JAMES MILLER
My visit to Japan was a very rich and rewarding one. Although I was a late addition to the ASA delegation, John Stephens and Professor Hiroko Sato quickly brought me up to date about the details of the trip. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Hiroko Sato for accommodating the travel needs of my wife, who accompanied me, and for anticipating all of my questions about travel arrangements. I thank, too, Professor Fumiko Fujita of Tsuda College, who assisted in the hosting arrangements during our visit to Chiba, and Professor Masahiro Nakano, our host in Kyoto. Our hosts were all very attentive to the smallest details of our trip, and responsive to any adjustments we wanted to make in our itinerary. We felt very warmly welcomed from the beginning of the trip to the end.
My wife and I arrived in Tokyo the Thursday evening before the annual meeting of the JAAS. This allowed us the opportunity to unwind a little and, at least, to stroll around in the immediate vicinity of the International House. We met Mary Helen Washington at the International House that evening and, the next day, Gary Okihiro and his son. Hiroko Sato had planned the arrangements of our visit to the last detail. On Friday two colleagues escorted us from Japan to Chiba by train. There we met our two colleagues from the West Coast—Herman Gray and Patricia Turner—and two colleagues from Korea—Jung-Mai Kim, President of the American Studies Association of Korea, and Eunsook Koo, Assistant Professor of English at Chongju University. The reception hosted by the executive committee of JAAS in Chiba that evening was our first opportunity to interact with our Japanese colleagues and an excellent opportunity for social and intellectual exchanges.
On Saturday, the first day of the JAAS conference, our delegation attended Mary Helen Washington’s presidential address. As others have noted, much of the meeting was held in Japanese and the participation of our delegation was generally confined to the sessions in which we presented papers. The structure of the convention did not preclude informal interaction among our Japanese colleagues, and us at lunch, in the corridors, etc. I met and talked to several graduate students; had an unexpected and thoroughly enjoyable encounter with David Stowe, whom I had known as both a Yale graduate student and a faculty member at Michigan State University, now teaching at Doshisha University in Kyoto; and met Howard Goldberg, Associate Professor of Culture and Politics at Chiba University, who spoke to me about the interest of several of his students in the works of Richard Wright, and who later that afternoon gave us a tour of Chiba. Although I missed the reception that evening because of fatigue, I am told that it was a very lively gathering and an excellent opportunity for informal conversations with our colleagues.
On Sunday, I attended a morning session featuring papers by Gary Okihiro, Patricia Turner, and Eunsoon Koo, and presented a paper on an afternoon panel with Herman Gray and two colleagues from Japan. These sessions were all well attended by very attentive audiences. My only complaint (and it is the complaint I have about so many academic gatherings) is that the conventional format of the panels and the number of presentations left very little opportunity for the kind of interaction between presenters and audience that I—at least—would have preferred. Nevertheless, these sessions did provide an opportunity to showcase one’s ideas and did lead, in some cases, to some interesting informal exchanges and feedback.
We returned to Tokyo on Sunday evening. On Monday, I made my second major presentation—a lecture at Seikei University in Tokyo. Though Professor Sato had arranged for me to lecture to about thirty undergraduates on African-American literature, my host, Professor Saburo Kawachino, Associate Professor of English, had written me to ask for an introductory lecture and I proposed “The Origins and Development of African-American literature.“ Professor Kawachino graciously met me at International House and escorted me by train to Seikei University. At the University he introduced me to Professor Michiko Shimokobe, who assisted with the question-and-answer period after my lecture. I found the students very thoughtful and attentive during my lecture, but not very knowledgeable—as Professor Kawachino had told me. I found it somewhat difficult, too, to engage them in the kind of dialogue I sought to create. I wanted to know much more, for example, about the kind of understanding(s) they brought to contemporary African-American life—what they read, viewed, listened to. The lecture went well, I thought, the attempt at conversation more fitfully. Nevertheless, a number of students came up after the lecture to speak to me on a one-to-one basis and, at the end of the session, I felt as if we had been involved in a genuine exchange.
For me, the intellectual highlight of the trip was our seminar and discussion at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. After we returned to Tokyo from the JAAS meeting, several of us met briefly at International House to discuss our seminar in Kyoto. We all felt that there would be little value in mechanically replicating our performances at JAAS. Moreover, we wanted to build on the resources represented in our delegation to engage in a serious dialogue about what American Studies practices meant from our respective vantage points. We agreed to initiate the conversation by making brief statements and then to open the floor to comments and dialogue by the faculty and students. The format could not have worked better. The conversation was lively, stimulating, and spilled over into the excellent reception after the seminar. The extraordinary success of this seminar could not have occurred without a high degree of intellectual generosity, cooperation, and high spirits among the ASA and Korean delegations. It was a very fruitful and illuminating exchange, one I would offer without hesitation as a model for the kind of conversation in which Japanese and American scholars can genuinely learn from each other.
During this trip, I became re-acquainted with an old colleague from the United States and met several new ones, including Howard Goldberg of Chiba University and Tsunehiko Kato of Ritsumeikan University, the author of several full-length studies of contemporary African American women writers. These are colleagues with whom I expect to enter fruitful scholarly exchanges in the future. I had long conversations with several graduate students, one of who has promised to correspond with me about his thesis on Mark Twain. I do not want to overlook my daily conversations with our colleagues from Korea, Jung-Mai Kim, and Eunson Koo, or with my colleagues in the ASA delegation. This was a group rich in resources and I very much value the time I spent with them.
IV. PATRICIA TURNER
Although weather conditions in California resulted in my missing my scheduled flight and arriving at Tokyo International Airport without my luggage, these annoyances were not harbingers for the coming week in Japan. I was still able to meet Herman Gray, Eunsook Koo, and Jung-Mai Kim at the airport where two students of Hiroko Sato ably gathered us and escorted us from the airport via subway to the station where we took a taxi to the Sungarten Hotel in Chiba. Professor Sato was waiting in the lobby with the broad smile we would grow accustomed to in the coming days. As promised, she delivered meticulous itineraries for our stay. That evening we also met Margaret Mihori of the Japanese American Friendship Commission. Although a representative of the Commission is not normally assigned to the delegation, I found her presence to be a real plus and she was every bit as gracious as our Japanese hosts were. The reception for us that evening was quite lush and our Japanese colleagues seemed quite sympathetic to the ravages international travel had taken on our bodies. The following day we went en masse to the JAAS meetings and listened to the two presidential addresses. These were both quite intellectually stimulating as was the more informal exchanges we were able to participate in during lunch and the reception. Professor Howard Gordon and Margaret Mihori also escorted us to casual repast that afternoon.
Professors Gray, Okihiro, Miller, and I delivered our papers the following day. I was surprised by the number of attendees at sessions, easily 75 at the one I participated in at 9:00 on a Sunday morning. The questions following our sessions lasted well into the break and were followed up during the day. We left Chiba that afternoon for Tokyo where we resided at the International House. The following afternoon I gave a presentation at the University of Tokyo. It was sobering to realize that their American Studies research center is larger and more lushly appointed than many I have seen in the U.S. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to talk with Professors Yujin Yaguchi, Yasuo Endo, and Yoshiko Takita. My audience of about 30 or so faculty and graduate students was quite animated during my presentation and, because of the many questions asked, Professor Okihiro’s talk started quite late.
In my first bullet train ride I went with my colleagues to Kyoto the next day for an evening of culture followed by two sightseeing escapades the following day. Although I enjoyed all of the food in Japan, I think the lunch at the French restaurant outside of Ritsumeikan University was my favorite. As my colleagues have already mentioned, the conversational informal presentations we delivered that afternoon proved to be the most intellectually satisfying event of the week. I can still recall many quotes and comments made by the graduate students in response to our talks. This was international intellectual exchange at its best. I have already had cyberspace contact with some of the new colleagues I made in Japan. I also thoroughly enjoyed the camaraderie that developed with the Korean delegates. I am very grateful for having had this wonderful opportunity.
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