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ASA-JAAS
ASA-JAAS Project Advisory Committee 2002
The purpose of this committee is to coordinate the participation of two delegates from the ASA in the annual conference of the Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS), under a grant from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. Coordination includes the selection of delegates, through a call for applications from the ASA membership, and the promotion of long-term benefits to scholars and the organizations on both sides of the exchange. Beginning with the ASA conference of 2002, in Houston, the project also includes domestic travel support for selected graduate student members of the JAAS who apply for funding to defray their ASA conference expenses.
Last year at this time I was able to report that 2001 was an excellent year in the project. This time, for the first time, it is possible for the ASA President who led the delegation to the 2002 JAAS conference, George Sanchez, to report that he, Jane Desmond, and Josh Brown “had the luxury of participating in a finely tuned program that has been meticulously developed over several years.“ Through the thirteen years since the inception of the ASA-JAAS project, its participants have identified, faced, and addressed issues and conflicts that have sometimes seemed cultural, sometimes personal and idiosyncratic, organizational and structural, and sometimes insurmountable. Ramon Gutierrez in one year even headed a task force charged with examining problems that seemed endemic to this international project. The great efforts made by the task force—some unselfish members of whom have not even had the privilege of being an ASA delegate, for instance Professor Gutierrez himself—and by the ASA Executive Director and staff, the ASA-JAAS Project Advisory Committee, and, I must say above all, the JAAS leadership and colleagues in charge of the project on their end have resulted for the moment in a finely tuned program. We have come a long way.
Professors Desmond and Brown have submitted detailed narrative reports about their activities in Japan in May and June 2002. Both did their jobs eminently well, and it may be just my inference, but one indication of how the two ASA delegates contributed to the smooth run of the project this year is that in my communications with the JAAS colleagues involved, I did not detect any hint of worry that they would or did fall short of the high expectations and standards of excellence set by the previous years’ delegates, Amy Kaplan and Susan Smulyan. Professor Brown delivered a paper at the JAAS conference (held at Meiji University, Tokyo, 1-2 June 2002) on “Technology and Society.“ Professor Desmond presented hers on “Citizenship and Participation.“ Both went on to speak at universities and public events.
In a separate arrangement through the United States Department of State, Professor Sanchez was especially recognized for his talk at the American Center in Tokyo, on Latino/a history. It was covered by a number of major newspapers, including the Asahi Shimbun, the newspaper-of-record in Japan. Professor Sanchez’s trip included a week-long series of speaking engagements and meetings in Korea with colleagues in the American Studies Association of Korea. This follows the precedent enacted by Mike Frisch, as President of the ASA in 2001. Professor Sanchez recommends that the visit to Korea be a regular feature accompanying the ASA President’s journey to Japan. Like the President’s trip to Japan, the extra expense of the one to Korea is funded by the State Department and the American Studies association of that country, not by the Friendship Commission.
A new development in the Japan-United States Friendship Commission project is the addition of funds to subsidize domestic (i. e. within the United States) travel of JAAS graduate students attending the ASA conference. In recent years the project has paid increasing attention to the inclusion of the next generation of Japanese scholars in American Studies. One of the aims of the project is to promote career-long scholarly relations among participants from the United States and Japan (and now Korea). For the JAAS, Masako Notoji and Naoki Onishi worked out a meticulous plan with John Stephens for budgeting these graduate student funds. They went on to invite applications, and Professor Onishi has announced that seven are receiving the first awards.
We are fortunate that this year, all three of the JAAS coordinators for this project will be attending the ASA conference: Professors Notoji, Onishi, and Masako Iino. We welcome them heartily. Funding for their trips has to come from outside the Friendship Commission grant, and this year they have had to redo funding for their ASA conference travel in almost entirely new ways. We are indebted to them for many things, including their making special efforts—successfully—to join us in Houston.
In the ASA, we the Advisory Committee are: Professors Joshua Brown, Jane Desmond, Amy Kaplan, Gail Nomura, Gary Okihiro, George Sanchez, Hiroko Sato, John Stephens, and myself.
Respectfully submitted,
Stephen H. Sumida, Chair
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