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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Shibusawa, Naoko. America's Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Main Argument: Shibusawa explores how "ideologies in the United States supported American foreign policy" in the initial postwar period, arguing that "how Americans reframed Japan after the war was influenced both by the way Americans came to grips with their new role as global leaders and by the way they viewed the meaning of democracy in a changing world where old hierarchies were being challenged" (11, 6). American rhetoric, particularly that produced by the group Shibusawa characterizes as "postwar liberals," transformed the racialized Japanese other into a feminized and childish figure, thereby too frequently reframing racism in other terms and undermining their own professed anti-racism.
Historiographical Engagement: Shibusawa's main sources are popular media such as Life, Time, Hollywood movies, newspapers, and other ephemera, as well as diaries and personal papers of individual figures.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples In the immediate aftermath of the war, Americans remobilized 19th-century frameworks for understanding the Japanese, focusing on women (who were servile and primed to pamper Westerners) and on children, who represented the future ("Japan as an enthusiastic young democracy ready to be educated and reoriented" (51)). Americans used their experiences of Japan during the Occupation "to transform their sense of Japanese inferiority from hostility into feelings of obligation and mercy toward Japan after a terrible war" (51).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Shibusawa compares the postwar American assessment of Germany and Japan and each country's respective conduct and actions in the war, finding that Americans tended to judge Germany harsher on account of Germany's having fallen away from the supposed upward pathway and moral foundations of Western civilization, which Japan did not share. By the same token, Americans were more disturbed by Japanese violence towards the Allies than towards other Asians. Germany should have known, while Japan couldn't have known; thus the trope of immaturity was deployed to reposition Japan as America's pupil.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Shibusawa evaluates the American repositioning of Hirohito after the war so that the emperor became understood as a peace-loving family man who was deceived by the militarists led by Tôjô Hideki, who became the arch-villain of the piece within a highly gendered framework (viz. the infamous photograph of Hirohito & MacArthur) that highlighted the difference between "good" and "bad" effeminate Japanese people from the American perspective.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples Speaking of "good" and "bad" Japanese, this chapter mentions the postwar treatment of Tokyo Rose and Tomoya Kawakita in their treason trials within U.S. courts, exploring as it does the larger postwar guilt within American society over the internment of Japanese-Americans and the effort to assuage this guilt by holding up Kawakita and Iva Toguri as "bad" Japanese-Americans while elevating "good" Japanese-Americans such as dead Japanese-American war heroes. This chapter is one of the book's most original, but also one of the most problematic, in that Shibusawa at several points indulges in what is almost certainly groundless speculation ("Kawakita, then, was probably a bully" (155)) while failing to make the actual facts of the Kawakita case entirely clear. Still, it did cause me to realize that much as the Japanese Empire forced Okinawans to prove their Japanese-ness in blood during the Battle of Okinawa, the United States forced its Japanese-American citizens to prove their American-ness either by patiently suffering internment or by shedding their blood on the global battlefields of the war.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Shibusawa explores the cases of Japanese students (all men) who attended college in the State as soon as three years after the cessation of hostilities, with particular attention to the first of them, ex-kamikaze candidate Nishiyama "Robert" Yukimasa. These students and the scholarships that funded their education reinforced a racism-by-other-terms in which light-skinned peoples possessed greater levels of civilization and in which Japan became the "star pupil" of the United States, an "international model minority" in Shibusawa's phrase.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the case of the so-called "Hiroshima Maidens," who came to the United States in the 1950s to receive reconstructive plastic surgery pro bono, as well as the "atomic orphanages" run by the same organization in Hiroshima, as ways of expiating America's "atomic guilt"--which, it must be said, it seems even from Shibusawa's analysis that most of the United States simply did not feel.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Shibusawa traces the development of a popular Hollywood genre of the 1950s, films set in Japan that, ultimately, reinscribed the prevailing social discourses and mores of the 1950s while "representing the culmination of an earlier postwar process that helped make the former enemy into an ally" (259), with a liberal dose of whitewashing and gay panic to spice the films up, as it were.
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples In the epilogue Shibusawa returns to her favorite punching bag, the "postwar liberals" who, in her estimation, "believed that they were making a break with the racist thinking of the past by emphasizing culture over biology and stressing the potential of nonwhites to 'mature' into modern societies. But as this book as shown, the postwar liberals, despite their good intentions, ended up reconstructing racism through other categories. Their actions helped to make racism unrecognizable as such to many Americans, and their influence continues even today. By reinforcing rather than challenging notions of essential difference, consensus liberals failed to promote an end to racist thinking." (296)
Critical assessment: Shibusawa is an international historian with a background in the United States, and above all it shows in her analysis: this is a book whose subject is very much the United States, with Japan as the object of discourse. There are a lot of niggling infelicities of phrasing that could have been corrected by any competent historian of Japan, and it's a real shame that Shibusawa didn't or couldn't find one to read her manuscript. As a historian whose primary field is Japan, I missed the Japanese perspective on and reaction to the topics discussed here very much.
On the continued theme of "put your biases under a microscope, scholars," it's hard to escape the feeling that Shibusawa's analysis is structured by a sort of latent animosity towards Christianity. Certainly at times she seems to conflate modern/Western/Christian in a way that blunts the power of her analysis and reinscribes some tired dichotomies. Also, I really don't think we should take anything Henry Luce wrote as the belief of America at large, not without actual evidence at any rate.
Another idiosyncracy that blunts Shibusawa's analysis is her persistent tendency to talk about "Euroamericans" as if they were all one monolithic group (!), similar to her tendency to talk about "Cold War liberals" in the United States as though they thought and acted with one mind with respect to Japan. Indeed, one suspects that Shibusawa's real target of analysis is this group, and (in her judgment) their own betrayal of their liberal post-racial vision in their discourses. Additionally, Shibusawa never bothers to prove her contention that the discourses she analyzes were not dictated by the American government but sprang up on their own in tandem but not in sync with government policy.
Finally, while it's not entirely questionable in a book that focuses so heavily on gendered discourse within society, Shibusawa at times seem to push the homoerotic implications of the discourse farther than makes one as a reader or as a historian entirely comfortable vis-a-vis her subjects. I don't think these things are outside the bounds of scholarship by any means (and I'm not surprised Shibusawa's next book project is apparently about gay panic in Cold War politics), but this is definitely the sort of thing that needs to be discussed, if I can be forgiven an uninentional terrible pun, explicitly.
Further reading: Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
Meta notes: Is it possible to assess media in history if your only sources are media? Note as well the persistent problem of assessing what actual impact media have on their audience.
Main Argument: Shibusawa explores how "ideologies in the United States supported American foreign policy" in the initial postwar period, arguing that "how Americans reframed Japan after the war was influenced both by the way Americans came to grips with their new role as global leaders and by the way they viewed the meaning of democracy in a changing world where old hierarchies were being challenged" (11, 6). American rhetoric, particularly that produced by the group Shibusawa characterizes as "postwar liberals," transformed the racialized Japanese other into a feminized and childish figure, thereby too frequently reframing racism in other terms and undermining their own professed anti-racism.
Historiographical Engagement: Shibusawa's main sources are popular media such as Life, Time, Hollywood movies, newspapers, and other ephemera, as well as diaries and personal papers of individual figures.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples In the immediate aftermath of the war, Americans remobilized 19th-century frameworks for understanding the Japanese, focusing on women (who were servile and primed to pamper Westerners) and on children, who represented the future ("Japan as an enthusiastic young democracy ready to be educated and reoriented" (51)). Americans used their experiences of Japan during the Occupation "to transform their sense of Japanese inferiority from hostility into feelings of obligation and mercy toward Japan after a terrible war" (51).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Shibusawa compares the postwar American assessment of Germany and Japan and each country's respective conduct and actions in the war, finding that Americans tended to judge Germany harsher on account of Germany's having fallen away from the supposed upward pathway and moral foundations of Western civilization, which Japan did not share. By the same token, Americans were more disturbed by Japanese violence towards the Allies than towards other Asians. Germany should have known, while Japan couldn't have known; thus the trope of immaturity was deployed to reposition Japan as America's pupil.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Shibusawa evaluates the American repositioning of Hirohito after the war so that the emperor became understood as a peace-loving family man who was deceived by the militarists led by Tôjô Hideki, who became the arch-villain of the piece within a highly gendered framework (viz. the infamous photograph of Hirohito & MacArthur) that highlighted the difference between "good" and "bad" effeminate Japanese people from the American perspective.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples Speaking of "good" and "bad" Japanese, this chapter mentions the postwar treatment of Tokyo Rose and Tomoya Kawakita in their treason trials within U.S. courts, exploring as it does the larger postwar guilt within American society over the internment of Japanese-Americans and the effort to assuage this guilt by holding up Kawakita and Iva Toguri as "bad" Japanese-Americans while elevating "good" Japanese-Americans such as dead Japanese-American war heroes. This chapter is one of the book's most original, but also one of the most problematic, in that Shibusawa at several points indulges in what is almost certainly groundless speculation ("Kawakita, then, was probably a bully" (155)) while failing to make the actual facts of the Kawakita case entirely clear. Still, it did cause me to realize that much as the Japanese Empire forced Okinawans to prove their Japanese-ness in blood during the Battle of Okinawa, the United States forced its Japanese-American citizens to prove their American-ness either by patiently suffering internment or by shedding their blood on the global battlefields of the war.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Shibusawa explores the cases of Japanese students (all men) who attended college in the State as soon as three years after the cessation of hostilities, with particular attention to the first of them, ex-kamikaze candidate Nishiyama "Robert" Yukimasa. These students and the scholarships that funded their education reinforced a racism-by-other-terms in which light-skinned peoples possessed greater levels of civilization and in which Japan became the "star pupil" of the United States, an "international model minority" in Shibusawa's phrase.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the case of the so-called "Hiroshima Maidens," who came to the United States in the 1950s to receive reconstructive plastic surgery pro bono, as well as the "atomic orphanages" run by the same organization in Hiroshima, as ways of expiating America's "atomic guilt"--which, it must be said, it seems even from Shibusawa's analysis that most of the United States simply did not feel.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Shibusawa traces the development of a popular Hollywood genre of the 1950s, films set in Japan that, ultimately, reinscribed the prevailing social discourses and mores of the 1950s while "representing the culmination of an earlier postwar process that helped make the former enemy into an ally" (259), with a liberal dose of whitewashing and gay panic to spice the films up, as it were.
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples In the epilogue Shibusawa returns to her favorite punching bag, the "postwar liberals" who, in her estimation, "believed that they were making a break with the racist thinking of the past by emphasizing culture over biology and stressing the potential of nonwhites to 'mature' into modern societies. But as this book as shown, the postwar liberals, despite their good intentions, ended up reconstructing racism through other categories. Their actions helped to make racism unrecognizable as such to many Americans, and their influence continues even today. By reinforcing rather than challenging notions of essential difference, consensus liberals failed to promote an end to racist thinking." (296)
Critical assessment: Shibusawa is an international historian with a background in the United States, and above all it shows in her analysis: this is a book whose subject is very much the United States, with Japan as the object of discourse. There are a lot of niggling infelicities of phrasing that could have been corrected by any competent historian of Japan, and it's a real shame that Shibusawa didn't or couldn't find one to read her manuscript. As a historian whose primary field is Japan, I missed the Japanese perspective on and reaction to the topics discussed here very much.
On the continued theme of "put your biases under a microscope, scholars," it's hard to escape the feeling that Shibusawa's analysis is structured by a sort of latent animosity towards Christianity. Certainly at times she seems to conflate modern/Western/Christian in a way that blunts the power of her analysis and reinscribes some tired dichotomies. Also, I really don't think we should take anything Henry Luce wrote as the belief of America at large, not without actual evidence at any rate.
Another idiosyncracy that blunts Shibusawa's analysis is her persistent tendency to talk about "Euroamericans" as if they were all one monolithic group (!), similar to her tendency to talk about "Cold War liberals" in the United States as though they thought and acted with one mind with respect to Japan. Indeed, one suspects that Shibusawa's real target of analysis is this group, and (in her judgment) their own betrayal of their liberal post-racial vision in their discourses. Additionally, Shibusawa never bothers to prove her contention that the discourses she analyzes were not dictated by the American government but sprang up on their own in tandem but not in sync with government policy.
Finally, while it's not entirely questionable in a book that focuses so heavily on gendered discourse within society, Shibusawa at times seem to push the homoerotic implications of the discourse farther than makes one as a reader or as a historian entirely comfortable vis-a-vis her subjects. I don't think these things are outside the bounds of scholarship by any means (and I'm not surprised Shibusawa's next book project is apparently about gay panic in Cold War politics), but this is definitely the sort of thing that needs to be discussed, if I can be forgiven an uninentional terrible pun, explicitly.
Further reading: Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
Meta notes: Is it possible to assess media in history if your only sources are media? Note as well the persistent problem of assessing what actual impact media have on their audience.