Register
If you haven’t already, register to start contributing news and events, and to search the Member Directory. Registration is free, but only open to current members of the American Studies Association.
Group Members
The following people are members of this group:
The following people are administrators of this group:
Member Tools
We're sorry. You are not yet a member of the ASA-JAAS.
Register or login to join this group.
MAIN | Reports | Submit a Proposal | Contact
ASA-JAAS
ASA-JAAS Delegate Report 2003
Report to the Japan-United States Friendship Commission,
The American Studies Association, and
The Japanese Association for American Studies
on the ASA-JAAS Project May-June 2003
Stephen H. Sumida, ASA President 2002-2003
University of Washington
31 July 2003
It was a great honor, privilege, and certainly pleasure for me to journey again to Japan, this time to join the ASA delegation of Professors Carla Kaplan and Ramon Saldívar to the annual conference of the Japanese Association for American Studies, where we participated in the proceedings and went on to deliver talks at various venues throughout Japan. My gratitude for the opportunity to address the JAAS and others in Japan is special because I was both the president of the ASA and am the chair of the ASA-JAAS Project Coordinating Committee. The trip this time was a culmination of my work in both capacities.
For all three of us, the trip was deeply significant for our own professional and intellectual lives. The engagement the project requires among scholars of not only two nations but three (since the delegation from the American Studies Association of Korea was also involved in the JAAS conference) puts our domestic American Studies as practiced and pursued within the United States in a special perspective of different needs and interests in the field internationally. Meanwhile, the interest shown in the work of us American scholars causes us to reflect on the intellectual curiosity and breadth of interests of the members of our Japanese audiences and therefore to compare with them the audiences we assume we address in our work in the United States. The trip this time (as has been the case for many previous delegates) has stirred considerable, even powerful interest in Japanese intellectual and artistic culture and scholarship and in working further in Japan. Most pervasive and felicitous throughout our journeys together, and separately, during the two weeks or so each of us traveled on assignment in Japan was the renowned hospitality of our hosts wherever we went. The following individual reports name these hosts and warmly thank them. I would like to thank three colleagues here for their responsibility in assuring that our trips were productive, safe, and enjoyable: Professors Masako Notoji, Masako Iino, and Naoki Onishi, who have constituted the JAAS International Liaison Committee during this and recent years of the project, and Professor Toyoomi Nagata, the JAAS President and Chancellor and President of Ritsumeikan University.
Speaking for myself and abstracting from the reports of the two ASA delegates, I do want to present five critical observations that include or imply recommendations as well. At the outset I want to make it clear that, except for the fact that all activities of the delegates while in Japan do affect or involve the JAAS directly or indirectly, some of the criticisms and recommendations do not have to do with the JAAS and the ASA-JAAS project per se but with the U. S. Department of State, possibly due to difficulties or irregularities peculiar (we hope) to this year:
1. Thanks to Professors Notoji, Iino, and Onishi, the ASA delegation was given, in early December 2002, a firm schedule of deadlines for submitting to the JAAS a list of possible papers for delivery not only at the conference but also elsewhere in Japan, draft paper titles and, later, final titles and paper abstracts, eventually the JAAS conference papers themselves so that they could be copied and distributed prior to the conference workshops, and itineraries that the travelers desired. The JAAS conference assignment for each of us to deliver a paper was set and clear long in advance. The assignments for the in-country travel and speaking engagements, however, took long to come, for at least two of us. In her report Professor Kaplan spells out this problem as she experienced it. My experience was that I had to leave for my trip to speak in South Korea twelve days before going from there to Japan, but my Japan assignment of talks—including their topics and titles—was not sent to me until I was in Korea, where I had to prepare the previously unassigned talks for Japan that I had not already written. To do so I had to spend long hours in an expensive business center of a hotel in Seoul. My patience and empathy for our program coordinators in the U. S. Embassy stayed with me, however, because I felt that this difficulty was caused by their lack of enough time to arrange the three very busy, two-week visits of us ASA people during the same time when the Embassy was obviously running hard to deal with issues concerning the Iraq War, SARS, and U. S. -Japan diplomacy. As chair of the Project Coordinating Committee, I will see if we can work with our by now close associates in the Public Affairs Division of the Embassy to try to expedite the assigning of talks to the delegates far in advance of their trips.
2. Professor Kaplan also comments on the need for lead-time to prepare original papers for the trip and the several talks that it requires. She was especially conscientious about the originality of her talks, which may have been all the more challenging because her published scholarship is so very copious and rich on the topics she is likely to address. I happened to have heard a criticism that differs from her observation that it may be common for scholars in certain fields, and she cites political science, to “give talks on already published work,” whereas this is not done in the humanities. A scholar of law and jurisprudence told me about the disappointment a Japanese audience felt (who included some members of the JAAS) when a scholar from the United States, in a field such as political science, delivered a paper that was close to what he had already published and that was already well known in its published form among his peers in Japan. The audience felt cheated. But while Professor Kaplan’s and my Japanese colleague’s comments seem to contradict each other, the point I think is that there is no clarity about this matter. Here again we on the project committees in both the ASA and the JAAS should try to help, to advise the delegates.
3. One member of the JAAS International Liaison Committee reveals how important a responsibility it is, to be hosting us ASA colleagues. The JAAS cannot relax from the time preparations and coordination of the trips begins to the time when each ASA colleague in turn leaves Japan. As we advise ASA delegates prior to their trips, we need to be mindful about not asking too much of the JAAS—a consideration that has been discussed at length in previous project reports and earnest discussions between the ASA and the JAAS. At the time I write this, the ASA proposal to the Japan-United States Friendship Commission (JUSFC) has just been submitted for an ASA delegation to the 2004 JAAS conference. The JUSFC has very kindly advised us to request funds to hire an administrative assistant in Japan, to relieve the full burden of tasks that the full-time professors and administrators on the JAAS committee have carried. An assistant may not be able to make up for a missed rendezvous such as Professor Kaplan reports (which she evidently handled resourcefully and with aplomb!). An assistant may well be able to anticipate and deal with the very first difficulties the first-time traveler to Japan may have upon arrival. As Professor Kaplan suggests, a Japanese phrase book, for instance, may be advisable. Here again, we on the project coordinating committee in the ASA may also help to advise the delegates. While it is still our feeling that the JAAS ought not be asked to serve as travel agents for the ASA delegates and any companions on their trip, a combination of having administrative assistance and better advising to inform the delegates about what the JAAS can and cannot be reasonably expected to do I hope will result in a convenient working arrangement among each delegate and the JAAS and ASA colleagues and staff involved in running the project.
4. The final two reflections I want to offer have to do with our papers that may be considered provocative even when we aim not to provoke but to discuss and analyze. As Professor Saldívar reports in detail below, his workshop lit a fuse (so to speak): after a heated and impassioned set of presentations and ensuing discussions, “. . . it became clear,” he writes, “from discussions with several members of the audience that JAAS workshops are not usually this volatile, nor often quite as exciting.” The workshop theme of “Patriotism Old and New” seems in hindsight to have been especially hot, timely, and inviting (everyone in the large room must have had opinions about the theme already in mind) in such a way as to be volatile. It is also true that during and after the workshop everyone had disagreements and agreements with some panelist and another (the views were so far apart). Those participants such as Professor Saldívar, the JAAS International Liaison Committee members, and the other panelists and their moderator who are closest to feeling responsible for the unanticipated blow ups that occurred have undoubtedly spent much time processing their thoughts and feelings about the event. It was a distinctive workshop indeed. But here I want to emphasize that some of the outcomes—including intellectual ones—were both strong and valuable, and there seems to me to be no way or need for the workshop to become something like a cautionary tale for future delegates. We should know that in the international setting of the JAAS conference and our talks in Japan we may be challenged in what for us are unusual ways. Professor Saldívar in a way has come out a “winner” in this (except that in my final analysis, it was not a contest in the first place). His own report indicates how he has processed the event and what we can learn from it, what value it has had. Here I also want to note that Professor Kaplan’s and our ASAK colleague Professor Min-Jung Kim’s talks in the “Language and Power” workshop clearly impressed and interested the JAAS, and the moderator, Professor Minako Baba, was a demanding and effective chair who led participants to think in fresh ways. Who knows what might have blown up, when the theme was “Language and Power,” if the moderator had not been so capable?
5. Some colleagues and officials in Japan expressed concerns, in various ways from various positions, about how ASA scholars ought to face questions of self-censorship of their papers in time of war—that is, a time when indeed “patriotism” is in question because of the United States’ words and actions in the world. The U. S. Department of State sponsors the trip of the ASA president and the travels and talks of the delegates when they tour outside of the JAAS conference. The JUSFC too is a government agency. When ASA scholars are critical of the United States, the U. S. sponsors may not be happy. When ASA scholars do not present their subject critically, the audiences may not be happy. By way of recommending a way of considering this question, I repeat a comment from Mr. Yoshitsugu Nakamura, the Programmer in the Program Development Office of the U. S. Embassy (Tokyo) who has for many years worked on the ASA-JAAS project: he noted to me that the ASA speakers do not “represent” the Embassy or the State Department, but they represent themselves and their scholarship. It is his position, then, that the Embassy, the Consulates General scattered about Japan, and the American Centers need not and should not be questioning patriotism and critical stances, controversy and provocation, as if the speaker’s views represented and somehow embarrassed the United States government. It was reassuring for me to hear this, and I have been told similar views by others connected with the State Department. Having said this, however, I note too that it is clear to me that individuals in the State Department offices do express, and have every right to express, their views about a speaker’s work—usually in great praise but sometimes in disagreement and even objection. It is possible and I think understandable, thus, that an ASA speaker may be criticized for being critical of the U. S. Furthermore, those who select speakers for the project rightly value intellectual rigor and a scholar’s ability to question, which may for us in the ASA amount to being a social construction that itself considers the speaker’s criticism of the subject, America, to be itself a sign of the speaker’s consideration for America. The selection process assumes that the speaker should be one whose contributions are reasoned and valuable, as Mr. Nakamura trusts and implies. In these times not simply of questions about but of attacks against American Studies, we may time-and-again be called upon to state, imply, and explain our relation to the nation, in our international projects. Our delegates need to be mindful of this.
I make these points with my predecessors’ reports in mind. Somewhat aside from reporting on the ASA-JAAS project, I reiterate the recommendations of past ASA presidents Michael Frisch and George Sanchez that we continue to have the ASA president make a speaking tour of South Korea, through ASAK and the U. S. Embassy in Seoul, in connection with the trip to Japan. ASAK has been holding annual, international American Studies conferences (in English) for longer than the ASA has had its annual conferences, and our ASA recognition of ASAK honors the ASA and is long deserved by ASAK. The ASA-JAAS project served in some measure as a model for ASAK to fashion their project, which ASAK has admirably and rapidly developed in the past three years. As the JAAS conference regularly includes participants from ASAK, so too does the ASAK conference include JAAS speakers and commentators. These projects of those two organizations have become intertwined in such ways, and this benefits the ASA participation in the activities of ASAK and the JAAS and, nowadays, the participation of both ASAK and JAAS colleagues in the annual meeting of the ASA.
Our individual reports follow.
ASA-JAAS Delegate Report
Ramón Saldívar
Stanford University
I write to report on my professional activities while in Japan to attend the Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS) conference in Kobe from May 30, 2003 to June 1, 2003, and subsequent lectures at various Japanese universities from June 2 to June 17, 2003. I should begin by saying at the outset that the trip was one of the most rewarding intellectual experiences I have ever had in my entire academic career. Quite apart from my satisfaction with the responses to my three separate presentations at five different venues, I was delighted to have developed what I am certain will continue to be excellent professional and personal relationships with Stephen Sumida and Carla Kaplan, my fellow ASA delegates to the JAAS. Moreover, I am very pleased to have begun what I expect to be long-term future collaborations with JAAS colleagues, Professor Masako Iino, Chair of the History Department at Tsuda College in Tokyo and Professor Masako Notoji, Professor of American Studies at the University of Tokyo, especially.
I arrived from San Francisco at Narita Airport on May 29, 2003, and after a brief rest met Professors Sumida, Kaplan, and Iino for dinner at the Tokyo Garden Palace Hotel for preliminary discussions concerning our speaking engagements. The next day, with jet-lag already in full force, I joined Stephen and Carla for an extended briefing on travel arrangements and other logistical matters with Mr. Warren Soifer, Program Development Officer in the Public Affairs Section of the American Embassy in Tokyo. Members of Mr. Soifer’s staff, including Mr. Oshitsugu Nakamara, answered questions and offered advice on travel in Japan. After the meeting at the US Embassy, Mr. Nakamura drove us to Tokyo Japan Railway station for our quick shinkansen trip to Kobe. At Tokyo Station we were joined by Professors Iino and Notoji, and by Professor Naoki Onishi, Chair of the Division of Humanities at the International Christian University, who along with Mr. Soifer accompanied us to Kobe.
Upon our arrival in Kobe on the evening of May 30, we attended a reception for the organizers and invited guests of the JAAS Conference at the Shin Kobe Oriental Hotel. In addition to meeting the various officers of the JAAS, I also had the pleasure of meeting Professor Youn-Son Chung, President of the American Studies Association of Korea (ASAK) and his wife, and his colleague, Professor Min-Jung Kim, of the Department of English at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul. Since my return to Stanford, I have already been in contact with both Professors Chung and Kim about future collaborations and expect this initial contact to continue.
Professors Kaplan and I attended the morning sessions of the JAAS Meeting at Kobe University on May 31, which were chaired by Professor Naoki Onishi and were conducted in English. Later that afternoon we attended the excellent Presidential Lecture by ASA President Sumida. His talk, “America at War Again: Issues of Ethnicity and Unity,” was eloquent, witty, insightful, and immensely well received. It set a high standard of intellectual rigor for the remainder of the conference.
The first of the two keynote Workshops was held the next morning, on June 1, 2003, on the topic of “Language and Power.” Carla Kaplan presented a provocative challenge to current American foreign policy and its use of the rhetoric of power in her talk, “Taxonomic Fever: Modernist Lessons for Challenging the New Racism,” while Professor Kim offered an enlightening comparison of Asian American studies programs in US and Korean universities, entitled “Language, the University, and American Studies in Korea.” This workshop was very successful.
The second Workshop was scheduled for later that afternoon on the topic “Patriotism, Old and New.” I presented a paper on “Globalization, the Post-War Transnational, and Cultural Citizenship” for this second workshop. At the time that I was originally selected as one of the ASA delegates to the JAAS meeting, Stephen Sumida had written to me requesting that I make my discussion of “patriotism” more historical and political. I quote Stephen’s email of November 27, 2002:
The ASA-JAAS committee asked me to inform you of a further consideration. If you can, would you expand the “patriotism” theme in your topic, for the JAAS conference, to broaden the historical and political context for your paper? This is an “American Studies” type of request. It happens, you see, that out of the applications we received, the best were by scholars primarily identified with literary studies--yourself and Carla Kaplan. Then there’s me, also in literature. The committee acknowledges that the JAAS expected that a historian or political scientist would be chosen for the “Patriotism Old and New” theme, the two themes having been selected in the first place so that one would seem to emphasize literature and language and the other would especially invite history and political science. So the committee is asking that you be the interdisciplinarian in your treatment of the topic, and we ask this knowing of course that in your case the request is not exactly for something extraordinary to you.
Fortunately, by happenstance, I had planned my talk to be not literary but more broadly historical and political in scope, so I felt that this consideration was well within the bounds of what I had proposed so I readily agreed. My talk focused on one aspect of the question of patriotism, namely, how one might conceive of national identity in a world of new and changing ethnicities. Moreover, I posed the question of how these changing ethnicities might add, or detract, from a sense of national unity and national coherence, especially in light of the events of September 11, 2001. In elaborating my argument, I offered the notion of “cultural citizenship” as an alternative way of conceiving of citizenship. By cultural citizenship, I meant a broad range of activities of everyday life through which groups claim space in society and rights as part of the national polity, and the obligations on the part of the national cultural citizens to participate in the act of creating a national identity. I argued that at a time when national security and national sovereignty are of such concern, the reality of protecting the nation’s borders and of safeguarding its identity becomes of paramount importance. The passage of the PATRIOT ACT marked the official American response to the fears generated by the realization that America’s borders were too porous and that too many persons with un-American ideas were infiltrating our shores. The USA PATRIOT ACT (an acronym for: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) of 2001 broadly expanded American law enforcement’s surveillance and investigative powers. In particular, the law raised complicated questions with respect to what constitutes the privacy of business records and the free exchange of electronic information. The law also created a new relationship between domestic criminal investigations and those activities related to foreign intelligence. I argued that this is a time in America, therefore, when the idea of “patriotism” is once again as at other point in our history being brandished with an even sharper edge than it usually is. People are again asking, “Who is American?” and, conversely, “Who is not American?” What does it mean to be a loyal American and to participate in the good will and shared fate of the creation of the commonwealth and its sense of community? These questions were the basis of my discussion of citizenship and patriotism.
I go into detail about my presentation in order to help explain what happened next. As Professor Notoji has described it in her report to the ASA about the workshop, the session proved to be more volatile than is normally the case in academic settings. I quote her report:
While Carla’s workshop went very smoothly with interesting questions and answers, Ramon’s workshop “Patriotism, Old and New” had many ups and downs during the session. I’m sorry to say that the workshop chair was rather uncooperative and gave unfair remarks to the presenters. I feel that the chair’s rude behavior had something to do with his general dissatisfaction with the JAAS leadership and with one of the presenters who did not submit his paper till one day before the workshop. Fortunately, Ramon took all this in a rather humorous spirit, and the workshop ended with no further disasters. Another incident during the workshop was that a Japanese scholar on the floor responded to a JAAS member’s presentation on the Arizona Memorial in Honolulu with his own recollection of a visit to the place with his parents. Apparently this person’s father was a member of the former Japanese Imperial Army and his mother experienced the A-bomb from Kure City near Hiroshima, and this made the visit an emotionally tense one for the whole family. He began to cry during his remark, and this added confusion and embarrassment to the already derailed workshop. (email to John F. Stephens, June 6, 2003)
I should elaborate on Professor Notoji’s comments. After my presentation, Professor Toshihiro Minohara of the Law School at Kobe University spoke about “The Influence of Patriotism upon American Foreign Policy.” Professor Yujin Yaguchi of the Center for Pacific and American Studies at the University of Tokyo spoke about his research on the responses of Japanese World War II veterans to the USS Arizona memorial site at Pearl Harbor in a talk entitled “Transnational Memories at Pearl Harbor.” In his response to their presentations and mine, Professor Takeshi Matsuda of the Osaka University of Foreign Studies, chair and moderator of our panel, objected to all three papers on the grounds that none of the presentations had either fully theorized or adequately historicized the idea of “patriotism” as such. He was also disturbed by the fact that our papers addressed as he saw it only American patriotism, challenging whether only Americans could be patriotic. He posed particularly pointed questions to each of us in this regard and repeated his “disappointment” in the papers. In my view, his comments, while perhaps fair enough in their intent, failed to recognize that the three presentations were based on widely different conceptions of “patriotism” from widely different disciplinary perspectives. More to the point, his comments did not take realistically into account the fact that the twenty minute time limit that he had imposed at the beginning of the workshop (when we had been informed the day before that we would have thirty minutes each) severely limited how wide ranging our discussions could be historically or theoretically. What disturbed me the most about his commentary, however, was the fact that I had indeed theorized and historicized the question of patriotism, basing my definition of the rights and obligations of citizenship and its relationship to patriotism on the history of citizenship from Aristotle’s Politics to Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Furthermore, it was my view that if the panelists had spoken primarily of American patriotism, it was because this was an American studies panel, not a panel on comparative patriotisms. My response to his comments was made in a humorous tone, which I believe helped relieve the shock and tension in the room that the moderator’s comments had created. The tension returned, however, when a member of the audience, a young Japanese professor, challenged the moderator’s implied position that particular case studies of issues of patriotism and of its relationship to citizenship were not as useful as more generalized or abstract discussions of patriotism. In attempting to make his point against moderator Matsuda, the young man, who attempted to use as examples the cases of his father, a surviving veteran of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and of his mother, a survivor of the American atomic bombings, broke down in anguished sobs. Clearly, the substance of the panel’s topic had tapped some deeply held beliefs and strong emotions in a number of us. The young man’s comments and emotional response, while certainly out of the ordinary in an academic setting, sharpened the focus on what is at stake whenever one defines citizenship or patriotism in exclusivist or overly abstract terms. The workshop ended with an excited set of exchanges between the panel members and the moderator and with many questions and comments by the audience. Afterwards, it became clear to me from discussions with several members of the audience that JAAS workshops are not usually this volatile, nor often quite as exciting. For my part, I felt that Professor Matsuda’s comments, direct and pointed as they might have been, had served the very useful purpose of getting everyone in the room to snap to the edges of their chairs with open-eyed alertness!
None of the remainder of my seminars or formal presentations had quite the stressful edge of this first experience in Japan. I was impressed in each of my subsequent venues with the depth of understanding on the part of my hosts of issues concerning American history, politics, society, and culture. My next major presentation was at the American Studies seminar at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto chaired by Professor Yoneyama. Speaking again in the company of Stephen and Carla, this time to a group of approximately fifteen faculty and advanced graduate studies, I presented a part of my current research on the Chicano intellectual and one of the originators of what we are today calling “border studies,” Américo Paredes. Entitled “Between Texas and Japan: Idioms of Race, Nation, and Identity,” my talk focused on Paredes’s post-war writings from Japan. Virtually unknown until my recent re-discovery of these materials, Paredes’s Japan Occupation era writings include numerous short stories, scores of personal letters, and some fifty plus newspaper articles detailing with his experiences as a Mexican American soldier in the US Army of Occupation in Japan from 1945-47. Writing as a reporter for US Stars and Stripes in the Pacific in English and for the daily newspaper Universal of Mexico City in Spanish, Paredes covered the War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo, the formation of the Japanese post-war government under the guidance of US Supreme Commander of Allied Powers Douglas MacArthur, the re-emergence of the Japanese entertainment and culture industry after the war, the beginnings of the Chinese revolution, and the start of the Korean War. In this talk I posed the question of how Paredes’s experiences in Japan from 1945 to 1951 at the dawn of the cold war influenced his understanding later upon his return to Texas of American imperial power, the nature of American racism, and the function of US vernacular culture. I found that these questions were of intense interest to my host, his colleagues, and their students. I experienced this intensity of interest again later when I repeated the lecture on June 9 at the University of Tokyo to Professor Masako Notoji’s seminar and on June 17 to Professor Masako Iino’s seminar at Tsuda College. After the stimulating seminar at Ritsumeikan University, Stephen, Carla, our Korean colleagues, and our hosts from the American Studies Seminar at Ritsumeikan were invited to an elegant dinner at the Junsei Restaurant in Kyoto by Professor Toyoomi Nagata, Chancellor of the Ritsumeikan University.
Perhaps the most challenging of my experiences in Japan was my lecture on “Chicano History and Chicano Culture” on June 4 at Aichi Prefectural University in Nagoya. The subject of the lecture was not one that I had originally proposed in my JAAS-ASA application but had put together later in response to a request for this particular topic from my hosts. This talk was co-sponsored by the American Center in Nagoya and so Ms. Donna Ann Weldon, Program Development Officer for the American consulate, very ably guided me to the university. Speaking to an auditorium filled with over a hundred and fifty students and faculty, I talked about Chicano history and culture, playing examples of Chicano music on CDs and showing examples of Chicano art, using a Keynote presentation program. What was challenging about this lecture was getting to Nagoya from Tokyo, delivering a lecture, meeting students and faculty, and returning to Tokyo, all in one day. Moreover, the topic, one that I normally cover in an entire course, was perhaps too broadly conceived and I should have opted to narrow the scope of the presentation. To add to the challenge of this lecture, the audience being composed in large part of undergraduate students of American and Latin American Studies, their proficiency of neither English nor Spanish was as complete as had been the case of the audiences before whom I had spoken to this point in the trip. Since my Japanese is non-existent, except for the occasional “konichiwa” ("good afternoon") when appropriate, the lecture required consecutive translation. Thanks to the superb effort of Mr. Masayuki Tominaga, an official translator for the US Embassy in Tokyo, the audience seemed very focused on the music and art I was discussing. The many excellent questions and comments that I received after the lecture confirmed that Mr. Tominaga had been successful in rendering my meaning elegantly well into Japanese. My host at Aichi Prefectural University, Professor Keiichi Tanaka, was generous and kind with his attentions and I was deeply impressed by the quality of his students. Later in the afternoon, before my return to Tokyo, Professor Tanaka, a collector of Japanese pottery and other ceramics, guided me through the beautiful collections at the Shinano Ceramic Center in the town of Seto, near Nagoya.
In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that my experience of the JAAS conference as one of the ASA delegates was entirely positive. In fact, the responses that I received, especially to my ongoing work on citizenship, the transnational, and globalization, and on Américo Paredes’s post-war writings from Japan, were exceptionally stimulating of further thought and useful for the next stage of my thinking. I consider myself very fortunate to have been selected as one of the ASA delegates and would be delighted to share my experiences with future delegates.
ASA Delegate Report of Carla Kaplan
July 21, 2003
Stephen H. Sumida
Professor and Chair
Department of American Ethnic Studies
Box 354380
Padelford B-508
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-4380
Dear Stephen:
As requested, here is my report – as an activities log – of my project-related days and activities. I am also attaching it to John Stephens.
As you will see, my experience was an extremely positive one. I thought that the organizers of the JAAS conference, in particular, were gracious and extremely helpful, and in my experience the intellectual connections made during the trip were both invaluable and ones that promise long-term connections of many kinds. Travel arrangements, for the most part, were clear and well-organized. Funding was quite adequate. Hotel accommodations were splendid. I have only one suggestion of a larger nature, for improvement, and because it would pertain to various different venues, I would like to make that suggestion here.
It came to my attention that the U.S. Embassy is unaware of the way in which scholars in the humanities work. A mere matter of weeks – in one case, days – before my departure for Japan, the embassy-related talks were still being organized. I received many requests for different topics, often ones completely unrelated to the three I had sent in, in this short interval before leaving for Japan. At the time, I was surprised that I was being asked to write whole talks in a matter of mere days. I did learn from one embassy official that when they deal with scholars from political science, they are able to request any topic on which that scholar has written and it is common, for such visitors, to give talks based on already published work. What I would like them to understand, for the future, is that in the humanities, in literature especially, we do not give talks on material that is already published. Each of my six talks for Japan, hence, was written precisely for those occasions. This means that it is not possible to determine those topics – or change them – without adequate lead-time. It seems to me that there are two alternatives to the current mode of operations. One is to ask for topics much further in advance, giving humanities scholars time to write the necessary paper. The other alternative is to tell humanities scholars that they are welcome to speak from previously published material. I have explained this to one cultural administrator in the embassy, but would be grateful to know that the information is passed on further, to avoid future problems.
As I stated earlier, travel arrangements were clear and well organized. I would make only two exceptions to this. My arrival in Tokyo, on Thursday May 29, was probably more confusing than it need have been. Scholars new to Japan could be supplied with more extensive information regarding the location of Narita and the various ways to get to their hotels from the airport. It might also have been helpful to have, in advance, a phrase or two written in Japanese such as “where is the train to X” or “I need to go to hotel X.” The only other instance in which I might have asked for more help was upon arriving at the Tokyo train station, where I was to be met by an embassy official. Unfortunately, that person was late. I was not given a name or contact number of anyone I could call in such a contingency. In cases where I did have such a contact name, it proved most useful to me. In my experience, travel in Japan was safe, efficient, and pleasurable. I wish we could offer visitors to the United States the kind of reliability and comfort I experienced traveling in Japan.
My first venue was the JAAS conference in Kobe and I cannot say enough good things about the graciousness, efficiency, sensitivity, and insight of our three Japanese hosts: Masako Iino, Masko Notoji, and Naoki Onishi. They were responsive to every matter of organizing, arrangements, and orientation. Masako Iino fielded endless requests for information and was always available to help with arrangements of every kind. Thanks to her, things went very smoothly. More importantly, they are splendid scholars with lively and engaging questions and comments. It was simply a joy to work with them.
The conference itself was an excellent learning experience and while there were only limited sessions in English, there was still a very good opportunity for intellectual exchange with Japanese colleagues. I thought the conference was excellent, marred only – and this is no fault of the organizers – by the limitations of the Kobe University campus, which lacked the kinds of basic services that conference participants were seeking.
The panel in which I participated, a workshop on Sunday, June 1, with the title “Language and Power,” was chaired very adeptly by Minako Baba. I thought that the papers went together well, that Baba’s comments were excellent, and that all the papers on the panel, especially that by Min-Jung Kim, were excellent. It was evident from our lively discussion session after the papers that we were raising questions of interest to the audience and also evident that the practice of making the papers available, in their entirety, was useful to non-English speakers. I would recommend that this practice be continued in future.
The closing event of our time in Kobe was, I gather, a special one, and was attempted for the first time this year. Not only was the boat cruise a great delight for all concerned but, I think it provided an important occasion for scholars to simply talk for the evening about their work, and to talk about their work in larger and more general terms. I think this was an excellent closing and would encourage next year’s organizers to repeat it.
After Kobe, we moved to Ritsumeikan for a seminar there. This was also an excellent experience and I appreciated, especially, the occasion following the seminar to engage with a range of Japanese intellectuals in discussion. The Ritsumeikan group was particularly interdisciplinary and I found myself wishing there had been more time to speak with them and also wishing that we had been able to hear some of them present their own work to us. Chancellor Nagata could not have been more gracious and it was a pleasure to spend time with him. The dinner he hosted for us after the seminar was simply exquisite.
After the seminar we had some free time in Kyoto and Julie Higashi, in particular, was wonderfully gracious in taking time to show us around Kyoto. The time I was able to spend with Julie, learning about her work with museums around the world that deal with traumatic histories, was some of the most engaging intellectual discussion I had on the trip.
On June 5 I left Kyoto for Tokyo, by train. As I have already mentioned, this was one of the only times when I felt that travel arrangements could have been more detailed. My embassy representative was not at the station to meet me when I arrived and I was lacking a contact name or number to call. However, we did find each other and I was successfully whisked off to the Tokyo American Center for a talk to a very varied audience. This was my first experience of working with simultaneous translators and I was deeply gratified that it went so well. Konomi Ari, the moderator, did a terrific job. The question and answer session after the talk was an extremely lively one and I was delighted to discover the depth of interest in Zora Neale Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance. The organizers of this talk, Ken Moskowitz and his staff, had been unaware that there was such interest in Hurston in Japan and I think we all learned a lot that night. Although no dinner had been planned that evening, my moderator for the talk, Konomi Ara, organized an impromptu evening of Japanese scholars working on African American literature and we had a wonderful discussion over dinner. These were splendid contacts.
On June 6 I flew to Sapporo, where Maki Tagaya met me. There was some confusion in Sapporo that had to be cleared up at the last minute. The translator had been sent the wrong talk and felt unable to simultaneously translate the one I had been planning to give. The talk that she had, and was prepared to translate, was not entirely appropriate for the venue. Fortunately, I was able to edit it sufficiently in the forty minutes prior to the talk for her to proceed with that talk. However, it might have been better to use a translator associated with the university rather than a professional translator, as all of the literary and scholarly terms used in my paper on “Modernism” – terms such as literary “canon” – were unfamiliar to her, both in Japanese and in English. When necessary, Professor Eijun Senaha was able to help her out. At times, I found myself wishing that he could do the translation himself. Since there was no activity planned following my talk, I spent the evening at the hotel, relaxing.
On June 7 I flew back to Tokyo where I had that evening free to visit with Professor Ara, who was gracious enough to have me to her home for dinner. This was a wonderful opportunity to learn more about her work and to continue our conversation about African American literature. On June 8, I had a day free to explore Tokyo.
On June 9 I took the train to Nagoya, where I very much enjoyed giving a paper on the Harlem Renaissance to faculty and graduate students of Nagoya University. Although there was not much time for discussion after the talk, I greatly appreciated the connections I was able to make there.
On June 10, I gave a paper at Tsuda College to Masako Iino’s class. This was a wonderful occasion and I greatly appreciated a chance to talk informally with the students there.
The reception hosted by Mark Davidson, that evening, was a gracious affair and an important occasion to solidify intellectual contacts and meet new people. It provided us all an important chance to continue some discussions and also to make future plans.
One of the great benefits of the two-week experience for me has been a set of intellectual connections that are continuing into the future. For example, I am working with Min-Jung Kim and Masko Notoji on the possibility of publishing Professor Kim’s paper, with commentary, in the new American Quarterly, on which board I serve. While we often feel that we would like a more internationalized conversation in the humanities, only through occasions such as this one, where scholars from many countries meet, hear each other’s work, and have a chance to talk, can such expanded opportunities be made possible.
I am grateful to have been a participant in this year’s ASA-JAAS events, welcome future contacts, and look forward eagerly to my next trip to Japan.
Sincerely yours,
Carla Kaplan
Professor
English
Taper Hall
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089
213-740-3745
ckaplan@usc.edu
Speaking Tour of South Korea and Japan
19 May to 12 June 2003
Report of the President of the American Studies Association,
for the American Studies Association,
the American Studies Association of Korea,
the Japanese Association for American Studies,
and the United States Department of State
Stephen H. Sumida, University of Washington
President, American Studies Association, 2002-2003
Following the advice of Ms. Helen Sebsow, the Program Officer of the Department of State in Washington, DC who has helped and continues to help me by coordinating several of my itineraries abroad, I am presenting here an annotated itinerary. I may make recommendations along the way, but I have tried principally to do so above, at the beginning of this entire package of reports. Please note that in the Korea part of my report I generally write surnames first, following the example of the detailed itinerary that the Cultural Affairs Officer, Joanne Martin, gave me there. In the Japan part of my report, I follow the different example of the detailed itinerary that places surnames after given names.
(Departed from Seattle, 19 May, arrived in Seoul past midnight on 21 May; delayed two hours en route at Narita International Airport, Japan, because of a slowly passing thunderstorm. Arrived at Incheon International Airport, South Korea, after ground transportation had closed shop for the day. Northwest Airlines provided buses to take passengers into Seoul.)
21 May: Seoul National University, American Studies Institute; talk on “Comparative American Ethnic Literature: Issues and Pedagogy”; about fifty students and faculty in attendance; Professor Cho Chul Won, Acting Director, my host. This was, as planned, a half-hour presentation followed by an hour of discussion. Discussion had some rigor and challenging questions. Note: this was a “Personal Program,” in that it was arranged not by the U. S. Embassy but between Professor Park Eunjung of Hankuk University for Foreign Studies and Professor Cho of SNU.
22 May: Lecture/discussion, “Re-viewing Asia/America through Indigenous, Immigrant, and Diasporic Asian/Pacific American Literatures,” in the Thursday evening lecture series of ASAK, the American Studies Association of Korea; held in the Public Affairs facility of the U. S. Embassy; about 80 ASAK members in attendance; a 40-minute lecture followed by 50 minutes of discussion. The discussion was animated. This lecture was my principal assignment in the ASAK project, under Professor Chung Youn-Son, President. The remaining Public Affairs Programs coordinated for me by Cultural Affairs Officer Joanne Martin followed this Thursday lecture in South Korea.
23 May: Sogang University, Seoul; lecture on “Comparative American Ethnic Literature” and graduate seminar presentation on Asian American theater (with screening of Frank Chin’s The Year of the Dragon). The first was a presentation for an American literature, undergraduate class (and guests) of Professor Roe Jae Ho, about 90 attending; the second was with a small group of graduate students of Professor Shin Sook Won, a drama specialist well-versed in Asian American and ethnic American theater.
24 May (Saturday): Lunch and outing with ASAK and English Language and Literature Association of Korea officers and past presidents, among them Professors Chung Youn-Son, Choi Young, Past President Yoon, Lee Young-Oak, and Chung Ewha, all of them already colleagues of ours in international American Studies.
25 May: Alumna/us of Duke University, Professor Park Eunjung (a Visiting Scholar in my department at the University of Washington, in addition to being a member of the faculty now of Hankuk University for Foreign Studies, or HUFS) and her husband invited me to the annual picnic of the Duke Alumni Association of Korea. The membership includes individuals who are extraordinarily prominent in South Korean society. This, on my free day in Korea, turned out to be a bus tour of islands to the west of Seoul.
26 May: HUFS; lecture/discussion, “American Studies Today: Critical Relations among Internationalism, Ethnic Studies, and Indigenous Studies,” with two other presenters in the session, an American Studies mini-conference of HUFS; about forty attending; big discussion followed, beginning with formal response to each of the three papers (already copied and distributed to conferees). This was the second of two “personal programs” initiated for me by Professor Park Eunjung.
27 May: Honam University, Gwangju; lecture/discussion on “Comparative American Ethnic Literature”; about thirty students and faculty members attended; 30-minute presentation followed by 20-30 minute discussion, without interpretation. Host: Professor Choi Byeong Hyon.
27 May: This was a busy day. The activities in Gwangju were followed by a flight back to Gimpo Airport (Seoul) and a back-to-back flight immediately afterward to the city of Daegu, where Simon Lee, the Second Secretary of the Public Affairs Section of the Embassy in Seoul, and the interpreter, Ms. Park Sun Ju, checked into our hotel to rest for the next day, during which we would have programs in two cities, Daegu and Busan.
The next morning, on the way to Keimyung University, we stopped to see and pay our respects at the section of the city subway where a fire, started by a deranged man with a can of kerosene he brought into a subway car, killed hundreds of people in February of this year. It is a site of profound loss.
28 May: Keimyung University, Daegu; lecture and Q&A on “Multiculturalism, Minority Culture and Literature”; 100 attended from Keimyung and other universities; 30-minute lecture with consecutive interpretation (one hour total), followed by forty minutes of discussion. Hosts: Professor Ryu Du Ha and Professor Huh Jung Myung. This program was quite formal, as the audience filled the lecture hall. We then rushed to the Dong Daegu, the train station, to depart for Busan.
28 May: Upon arrival in Busan (after a seventy-minute train ride) we rushed to Kyungsung University, where the audience was already waiting. Kyungsung requested the lecture on “Multiculturalism, Minority Culture, and Literature,” which the interpreter Ms. Park and I delivered again in an hour, in somewhat more polished form than our performance earlier in the day. The audience of about 100 consisted of undergraduate and graduate students and a good number of faculty members. Those who asked questions did so with seriousness and a certain rigor that I appreciated, for the challenge, making this session one of the best in my South Korean series of talks. The program was followed by a lavish dinner at the Paradise Hotel where Simon Lee, Ms. Park, and I were lodged. The two days that culminated in Busan involved some scrambling, plenty of hard work, and intelligent discussion as one reward. All together, the accommodations in Busan subsequently made this, my final stop in Korea the most relaxing in my entire trip. The Paradise Hotel is like a resort. My host at Kyungsung University, Busan, was Professor Lee Hyun Suk.
I left Busan on 29 May and arrived at Narita Airport in Japan two hours later. My first appointment, at the Tokyo Garden Palace Hotel where I stayed for the night, was with a group of graduate students who studied in my seminars at Tsuda Women’s University from September 2001 to January 2002. We were to have two reunions during my visit this time to Japan.
On 30 May a group of us boarded the Hikari bullet train at Tokyo Station. We were bound for the Shin-Kobe Station and the Shin-Kobe Oriental Hotel. Our group included Warren Soiffer, the Program Development Officer in the American Embassy in Tokyo, Professors Masako Notoji, Masako Iino, and Naoki Onishi of the International Liaison Committee of the Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS), Professors Carla Kaplan, and Ramon Saldivar, the two delegates of the American Studies Association (ASA), and myself.
31 May: The annual meeting of the JAAS began, then, on 31 May and ran through 1 June, at Kobe University. This activity and the Ritsumeikan American Studies Seminar that immediately followed it are JAAS ones in that they are not coordinated by Mr. Soiffer, his associates, and their staff in the Embassy. The ASA delegates are funded by the JUSFC grant expressly for their participation in these JAAS activities. The funding sponsor for the ASA President, however, is the U. S. Department of State.
In their own reports Professors Kaplan and Saldivar narrate and assess the JAAS conference workshops in which they participated. I had the distinct privilege of delivering a presidential plenary speech to the JAAS, on Saturday afternoon, 31 May. While I was aware that some of my predecessors in office were able to adapt the ASA Presidential Addresses that they had delivered at the ASA conference the previous November, I was determined to write a speech especially for the JAAS. Many of them have become acquaintances, friends, and indeed close colleagues of mine over the years. Some of the closest colleagues had already heard my ASA Presidential Address because they had been at the ASA annual meeting in Houston. Others of the JAAS had gotten word of my ASA speech second hand. Further, the JAAS needed a draft title for my JAAS address in December 2002. Among us we settled on the title and topic, “America at War Again: Issues of Ethnicity and Unity.” The topic itself was changing every day. The resulting speech on 31 May would not only be “new” but would be getting “old” even as I spoke. This was particularly clear and somewhat worrisome to me when I was writing and completing the speech to meet the 30 April deadline the JAAS gave me for the complete text. During my time of concentrated meditating and writing on “America at War Again,” America was indeed at war again. I was writing on a moving target.
Our JAAS colleagues received my plenary address with a greater understanding and appreciation than I had ever anticipated, perhaps because my concern really had been about the topic itself and not what our colleagues would think of my treatment of it. Our time of war, after all, is filled with stress and anxiety. The fact that I had written an original speech for the JAAS was much appreciated. The topic, timing, and delivery in exactly the allotted time (35 minutes, without interpretation and without Q&A, but with a warm and congenial introduction by the JAAS President, Professor and Chancellor Toyoomi Nagata), and the shared seriousness among colleagues and students who filled the auditorium (perhaps 200 attended, perhaps more) were among the factors that contributed to the success of the occasion. For me, “success” has meant that by writing and delivering that address, I repaid in some measure our JAAS colleagues for years of their own ideas, their respect and hospitality, and their sheer kindess. The address will be published this year in the journal of the JAAS.
1 June: Immediately after the end of the JAAS conference on Sunday, 1 June. I was able to meet briefly with the Asian American Literature Association (AALA), which Professor Teruyo Ueki of Kobe Women’s University began a dozen years ago. The meeting was far too brief, held at a Japanese restaurant on the site of one of the esteemed saké breweries of the region. I had less than an hour to sample the liquid wares. Even greater than that regret, I do wish I could meet again with the AALA to talk shop. It was my first opportunity to attend an AALA gathering, though I have known Professor Ueki, my host along with Professor Yoshiko Takita of Tokyo University, through the years the organization has been active.
My schedule was tight because I had to catch a boat. It was for the dinner cruise in Kobe harbor with the ASAK President Youn-Son Chung and his wife Kyung Sook Lee, the ASAK delegate Professor Min-Jung Kim, Professors Kaplan and Saldivar. Our JAAS hosts and companions this evening were Professors Hiroko Sato and Masako Notoji. The dinner service turned out to be very elegant, quite French—and serene.
2-3 June: I spent my free day with old friends, Professors Koichiro and Sumiko Fujikura. The former is a professor of law and jurisprudence at Doshisha University. They invited me to their mountain home outside of Kyoto. Their companionship and the relaxation there were splendid. A brook runs and tumbles alongside the house. Frogs squeak and chirp. A certain bird whistles—the uguisu. I was treated to a beautiful place.
3 June: The Ritsumeikan American Studies Seminar met on this afternoon, in Kyoto. Organized by Professor Yoneyama, the seminar consisted of presentations by Professors Saldivar, Kaplan, and myself. Discussions followed. About fifteen people (faculty members of Ritsumeikan and nearby universities and some students) attended, most of them by invitation. My own talk was on “Japanese American Literature in Historical Perspective.” Discussion filled the scheduled time. Afterwards, cars took us all to a classic (and contemporary) Japanese restaurant devoted to the preparation and serving of courses made out of tofu. It was neighboring Nanzenji, one of the great Zen temples of Kyoto. Professor Toyoomi Nagata, the Chancellor of Ritsumeikan University and the president of the JAAS, hosted the elegant dinner and made the gathering grand and convivial.
4 June: By chance, the Amherst College Choral Society and I were at Doshisha University at the same time. I am an alumnus of the Amherst College Glee Club. The group visited Amherst House, where I was staying for two nights there in Kyoto. Professor Fujikura (also an alumnus of Amherst) asked me to tell them about the historic connections between Amherst and Doshisha, where the first Japanese graduate of an American college, Joseph Hardy Neejima, went on to found the Doshisha in the late-nineteenth century. Some of the singers knew me from a conference we had had at Amherst College in April. I had the pleasure of attending the joint concert of Amherst and Doshisha choral groups that evening.
5 June: I flew to Okinawa, where I was met by Mr. Bruce Nelson, the Public Affairs Consul of the U. S. Consulate, Okinawa, and Mr. Yoshitsugu Nakamura, our Programmer from the U. S. Embassy in Tokyo and a native of Okinawa. It was my first visit to that island.
In the afternoon, at the University of the Ryukyus, I met Professor Katsunori Yamazato, the Director of the American Studies Center. (It happened that we probably had first met in 1973 during my last semester as a fulltime instructor at the University of Hawai´i, when Katsunori Yamazato arrived from Okinawa for graduate studies in our English Department.) At the University of the Ryukyus I was asked to deliver my talk on “Japanese American Literature in Historical Perspective.” About fifty attended, many of them undergraduate students in Professor Yamazato’s American literature course. The presentation was without interpretation, yet the questions and discussions that followed my lecture suggested that I was well understood. Following this stimulating (for me, anyway) activity, a group of scholars took Mr. Nelson, Mr. Nakamura, and me out to dinner, where I was additionally asked to present informally a paper I had written for this trip, “Okinawa and Hawai´i: A Comparative Perspective.”
My anticipation about visiting Okinawa for the first time was complicated. I had proposed the Okinawa and Hawai´i topic with only a few ideas in mind that turned out to be impressionistic at best. Beginning in ignorance, I had had to go on to do some homework, such that writing this paper meant that I learned more from my study than I did preparing other papers, which required more by the way of reflection and rethinking on topics, themes, sources, and theses already familiar to me. That first dinner meeting with Okinawan scholars was my first chance to try out my materials and observations. There already were appearances that my comparisons might work: the Okinawa I was seeing and experiencing seemed a lot like the Hawai´i I know well. I began revising my paper by the varied responses of my hosts that evening. I did not have to dump the paper.
6 June: In the morning my friend and host Professor Yamazato took me, by my request, to the Okinawan Peace Memorial. Upon our arrival, we discussed how it is that in Japan, the sites of horrific acts of war—Hiroshima and Okinawa—are called “Peace Park,” “Peace Memorial,” and “Peace Museums,” whereas historical counterparts in the United States are called “war memorials.” That was my prelude to walking among the polished black granite tablets engraved with names of the dead in the Battle of Okinawa, June 1945. My aim was to find the name of the grandfather of the writer and filmmaker Sherman Alexie, my former student, my friend, and now colleague. He had told me a year ago that he would go to Okinawa one day to search for any memory of his grandfather. This intent of his was alluded to on the Oprah Show earlier this year, when Oprah summoned Alexie to Chicago to receive a gift—three military medals that the Alexie family had not been given until now, for the valor of the late grandfather. I had told him that I would try to look things over for him on my trip to Okinawa. Professor Yamazato and I had to search for the name, because the grouping of the American names by categories of Navy, Marines, Army, and Others interrupts the alphabetical order. The arrangement of memorial slabs makes something else obvious: more Okinawan civilians were killed in that war on their island than Japanese soldiers or American soldiers. Down the rows and at the start of the Army section we came eventually to the engraved name of Adolph Alexie. We paused at length. The engraving is deep and sharp to the touch. A few hours later I emailed Sherman to tell him. He replied that hearing from me he felt pain (I infer because it was confirmation of how his grandfather was killed) and deep honor. It was the most moving time of my trip.
On the afternoon of Friday, 6 June Mr. Nelson, Mr. Nakamura, and Mr. Nelson’s assistant Ms. Gushi took me to Kin-cho, the town of Kin, population about 10,000 today but the place that provided the major portion of Okinawan emigrants to North America, Hawai´i, the Philippines, and Brazil in the early twentieth century. Kin-cho is also the site of the shocking rape of a girl by several Marines from Camp Hansen, located in that town. The meetings that Mr. Nelson, Ms. Gushi, and Mr. Nakamura arranged for me there constituted the first such program the U. S. Consulate had had in Kin-cho, despite the important and indeed celebrated connection, through immigration, that the town has with the United States. We met with the energetic mayor of Kin-cho, Mr. Tsuyoshi Gibu; and in our islander, small world style we talked and found that we knew people in common—among them a cousin of his (she being a scholar of Okinawan American studies in the United States) and the brother-in-law of my wife and me, he being a Hawai´i State Senator who co-signed the Resolutions hanging in their frames on Mayor Gibu’s office walls and recognizing the close kinship between our two islands. The Mayor’s driver took us on a brief tour of the surrounding farms. The appearance of the fields, the spring water that fed them, the patches of taro, the climate and the breeze confirmed my strong preconception and prejudice that Okinawan immigrants who farmed with my grandparents in Hawai´i might have felt right at home at the edge of Pearl Harbor where springs are abundant. I was feeling at home in Kin-cho.
Back at the City Hall a group of about twenty community historians, librarians, and teachers had gathered to meet with me. My itinerary stated that we would have a roundtable discussion of “The Impact of Okinawan and Japanese Emigration to America.” That discussion did not happen. I was the sole speaker, assisted by Ms. Hatsumi Kinjo, the interpreter. To speak about “the Japanese American experience,” as I was asked to do in what would have been the roundtable discussion, I chose to speak specifically about “Okinawa and Hawai´i.” With consecutive interpretation I delivered an impromptu version of that paper I had drafted. My impression was that I was not saying anything new to the scholars, educators, and resource persons gathered there that afternoon. Not expecting to deliver that talk in particular, I failed to bring with me two videotape clips that should accompany the presentation; but I do not think that they would have been effective anyway. I am still puzzled about what others expected of this meeting. Nevertheless, I certainly hope that it being the “first” such meeting does foretell that there will be others to come, with scholars such as Mayor Gibu’s cousin, Dr. Edith Kaneshiro, meeting productively with the historians of Kin-cho.
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]