This article takes a comparative approach to the transatlantic abolition of slavery, looking at similarities and differences of the processes of the abolitions. Looking at the abolitions from broader and comparative perspectives will help us move beyond the localizing tendencies.

The meaning and the uniqueness of abolition of slavery in the United States are not fully grasped only by narrow nationalistic approaches. To understand the unique process of abolition in the southern United States, the Civil War must be placed in a perspective of the transatlantic abolition in the Plantation America.

The wave of the plantation and slavery moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic world. It shaped the Plantation America, expanding from northeast Brazil in the south to the Chesapeake in the north as an extensive plantation complex area. The Plantation America was an integral part of the capitalistic Atlantic system.

The laws of abolition of slavery were enacted on both sides of the Atlantic. From Haitian Revolution to Brazilian liberation of all slaves in 1888, the abolition of African-American slavery in the Americas in the nineteenth century can be considered as a series of social revolutions.

The Civil War was so devastating and the most tragic civil war in the western hemisphere, bringing a total of approximately 620,000 military deaths to liberate about four million slaves. It was an exceptional case of the abolition of slavery. Compared to the relatively “peaceful” slave emancipations in the Caribbean and Latin America, except St. Domingue, the American Civil War was awfully violent. The abolitions of slaveries in St. Domingue and the southern United States were attained after sanguinary collisions (slave revolt and civil war). The two abolitions were exceptional cases of the ways of slavery abolitions in the Americas.

In the first place, the American Civil War did not began to abolish the Southern slavery itself but to restore the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, being merely a war measure to win the war, had no references to the inhumanity of slavery. Many people wondered why the most democratic nation in the western hemisphere became the scene of the bloody civil war to abolish such inhuman institution which completely denied freedom, equality, and democracy. We can find some of the reasons in the characteristics of the history of the United States. One of them is a deep-rooted political tradition of conflict and compromise between nationalism and federalism, symbolized in the Constitution of 1787. The price of the compromises was the expansion of plantation slavery into the deep South, and had to be corrected only after the Civil War. The two sections could not afford to make the last and most important concession, abolition of slavery, by any means other than civil war.

And more important reason was an extremely racist character of the slave-holding South. The deep-rooted racism of the South was most intensive in the Americas. Because the social order of the South was closely tied to white supremacy and racial purity, southern whites, being afraid of racial turmoil as a result of slave liberations, refused stubbornly to abandon the slavery. The freeing of slaves would involve not simply the termination of a system of labor, but the destruction of a way of life.

It may be theoretically possible that if the democracy of the United States functioned effectively, the slavery of the southern United States could be abolished peacefully, gradually, and democratically as Lincoln envisioned. For example, the fifth amendment of the Constitution prescribed that no person shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. It means that the slaves could be liberated with compensation constitutionally. And the act of 1862 abolished slavery in the District of Columbia with compensation.

In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale, Ishmael’s self-recognition as a castaway is one shared with Ahab the tyrant, Ishmael’s double. Captain Ahab seeks to revenge himself upon Moby Dick in order to satisfy his sense of loss as an orphan. Properly speaking, however, his vindictive venture cannot result in success. When someone tries to inflict vengeance on another, in general that means one is seeking to build an equal relationship, which is an undertaking that cannot end in success. It could be said, therefore, that Ahab’s voyage in pursuit of the white whale does “succeed” ― through terminating the nightmare about his own finiteness ― in bringing his own self-hatred to an end.

As for Ishmael’s sense of being a castaway, Leslie A. Fiedler suggests in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) that his relationship with Queequeg on shore before the Pequod sets sail serves to ease and heal his pains. At sea, however, Ishmael continues to nurture feelings of abandonment. In Chapter 87, “The Grand Armada,” for instance, he observes the mothers and children of whales as they “serenely reveled in dalliance and delight” in contrast to his own sense of being adrift “amid the tornadoed Atlantic.” It seems that Ishmael’s sentiments are divided by sea and land, and that he is not restored from the “illness” of being sentimental at all.

Harrison Hayford attempts an analysis of “unnecessary duplicates” in the text to develop a hypothesis that the homosexual bond between Ishmael and Queequeg was probably generated in the final stage of Melville’s composition. This supposition can be further developed by examining Ishmael’s process of recovery from the trauma of being a castaway. Ishmael can only become aware of his feelings of guilt, that is, his sense of abandoning the stepmother on shore, when he is embraced by a maternal figure, the Rachel that, “in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” It is in the “Epilogue” that Ishmael discovers that it is she, not himself, who weeps with the pain of being abandoned.

Fiedler calls Moby-Dick “perhaps the greatest love story” in American fiction, a story of “innocent homosexuality.” It is also a love story between a mother and a son, the latter of whom bears the guilt of abandoning her and seeks to expiate it. Here too is described the pursuit of the paradoxical redemptions of two castaways, Ishmael and Ahab: one experiences cyclically the trauma of shore to sea, and again back to shore, while the other in a linear fashion cruises across the oceans in search of salvation, and so to bring his nightmare to an end.

In March 1897, the Hawaiian government refused entry to Japanese emigrants. That refusal led to a confrontation between Japan and the Republic of Hawaii. Because the United States had started to commit itself to the annexation of Hawaii however, the rivalry between Japan and the Republic of Hawaii transformed into enmity between Japan and the United States.

The primary purpose of this paper is to analyze the Japan-U.S. confrontation at the turn of the century over Hawaii from the perspective of Japan’s pursuit of national prestige and America’s promotion of overseas expansion. This viewpoint has been insufficiently addressed in reports of the relevant literature. Rivalry with the United States over Hawaii and annexation of the islands as its consequence were the price Japan paid for its national prestige. Confrontation with the United States over Hawaii was an unintended result to Japan.

From March 1897, Japan had had no intention of occupying Hawaii or challenging the supremacy of the United States over the islands. Japan sought merely to emulate Western powers and achieve equal status to that which other countries had enjoyed. The primary objective was national prestige. When its citizens were refused entry into Hawaii, the Japanese government demanded indemnity, even resorting to the dispatch of a warship. When the United States attempted to annex Hawaii, it protested diplomatically but vehemently against the effort. Finally, in return for approval of America’s annexation of Hawaii, the Japanese government demanded that the United States guarantee its vested rights and most-favored-nation treatment. It was important to the Japanese government that Japanese emigrants in Hawaii be able to enjoy equal status to those of citizens of the Western powers, without suffering discrimination.

Although Japan’s vigorous behavior related to Hawaii was primarily undertaken for national prestige, the behavior was mistakenly regarded as a severe threat by the United States, which valued the geographical position of Hawaii in the context of commerce and geopolitics. The United States adopted the annexation of Hawaii as a measure to meet the threat posed by Japan. The Japanese government persisted strenuously in maintaining its national prestige as a great power. Thereby, it spoiled its friendship with the United States contrary to its intentions, even producing the unintended result of promoting America’s annexation of Hawaii. Confrontation with the United States over Hawaii and annexation of the islands as its consequence were the price Japan paid to assert its national prestige.

A major factor accelerating globalization is the development of various networks. Maritime and aviation networks increase the transnational movement of people and things. At the same time, telecommunication networks send messages instantaneously to the other end of the globe and enable people to share information without travelling. Historically, powerful states in international politics developed and exploited global telecommunications networks. The British Empire had extensive telegraph networks in the 19th century; in 1892 it owned 66.3% of telegraph networks in the world. The United States has had an even larger influence over the Internet since the 1990s. The U.S. presence today in Internet traffic, technologies and services is bigger than any other country. Submarine cables, whether historically in telegraph networks or in today’s internet networks, are an essential infrastructure for connecting nodes across network. The first submarine cable was laid in 1850 at the bottom of the Straits of Dover. Today there are numerous undersea cables in every sea. However, while there was a shift from the copper cables of the telegraph network to the fiber-optics of today, it is not clear why and how Britain lost its dominance to the U.S. in the area of submarine cables. This paper analyzes historical documents and data to answer these questions. It argues three points. First, between the end of the old copper cables and the new fiber-optic cables satellite’s caused technological disruption in the Cold War era. Satellites enable wider coverage over vast areas and have more capacity to send messages than copper submarine cables. The U.S.-led Intelsat made it easier to communicate overseas by satellites; Britain could not catch up with the U.S. and Soviet Union in satellite development. Second, the increase of communication demands needed a technological innovation and made both copper cables and satellites obsolete. Optical fiber was a disruptive technology and replaced old telecommunication systems. Finally, the rise of sovereignty claims over communications channels by developing countries after World War II weakened state control over new telecommunication systems. Telecommunication providers were privatized and laid private cables instead of common carrier (or consortium) cables, which were easier for governments to control. Therefore, the foundations of U.S. control over the Internet is not based on legal arrangements, but on technological advantages and the geopolitical layout of submarine cables. The vast Atlantic and Pacific Oceans could be disadvantageous for the U.S. But it led innovations of satellites and optic submarine cables and put them in place earlier than other competitors. Britain failed to take advantage of its earlier expertise and it made the U.S. a key hub in the new information age.

Presently, Australia is one of the ANZUS members and a very close ally of the United States. However, Australia, since the country is one of the dominions of the British Empire, it had strong ties to the United Kingdom until the 1960s. The 1930s was the first phase of transformation of Australia from a strategic partner of the United Kingdom to the United States. Australia was drifting from one ally to another in order to respond to the new menace of Japan in Asia Pacific due to its ascendancy and aggressive attitude. Australia tended to appease Japan because the country was not sure if it would receive American support against any Japanese threat.

In this article, I will explore the important shift of Australian appeasement policy toward Japan which occurred in September 1940, because the country considered the relations with the United States much more important than the relations with Japan.

American policies toward Japan since the outbreak of WWII in Europe were as discussed below.

The first policy was to reinforce economic pressure on Japan. The second one was to improve relations with the Soviet Union. The third policy was to assist China. Economic pressure toward Japan was quite problematic, because Australia believed that it would force Japan to go southward to get necessary raw materials rather than be restrained.

Assisting China turned out to be quite different from the policy of Australia which encouraged Japan and China to have a general settlement about Japanese interests in China. This was because the United States regarded any compromise with China as unnecessary and there was no possibility of Japan agreeing to a settlement without China’s compromise. And, the U.S. relations with the Soviet Union seemed not to have any concrete results until the outbreak of German-Soviet war, June 1941.

However, the discussions with the United States by Australia which followed the German Blitzkrieg had Australian government decide to give up their appeasement policy toward Japan. It was not because they were certain that the United States would support them with armed forces when Japan attacked Australia, but they believed that the relations with the United States ― even without any promise of armed support― would be much more important than relations with Japan.

Since September 1940, the Australian proposal of ‘general settlement’ in Asia Pacific became just playing for time and not, literally, a ‘general settlement.’

This thesis aims to show how America’s Middle East policy began to tilt towards a pro-Israeli stance in the aftermath of the Six Day War by analyzing the Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s reaction to the USS Liberty incident.

On June 8th, 1967, the USS Liberty, a U.S. intelligence ship, was assaulted by the Israel Defense Forces while sailing off the coast of Gaza, leaving 34 Americans killed and 171 injured. Officials for the Johnson administration initially argued as to whether the attack was intentional or mistake, but eventually accepted Israel’s claim that the attack was an “innocent mistake.” This, despite the fact that the officials had yet to receive results from American investigation teams.

While previous studies of the USS Liberty incident principally focused on Israel’s motives for the attack, this study will argue why the Johnson administration swiftly decided to downplay the attack before the conclusion of American investigations. Previous studies of America’s policy toward the Six Day War demonstrated a lack of interest in the USS Liberty incident, perhaps due to its relatively nominal impact on the overall peace process. This author, however, explores the possibility that America’s reaction to the USS Liberty incident was driven by officials’ desire to strengthen relations between the United States and Israel in the wake of the Six Day War.

Consequently, this study will evaluate the USS Liberty incident in terms of considering the process from how the United States began tilting toward a pro-Israeli stance. In relevant literatures it has been clarified that the United States actively displayed a pro-Israeli stance during the period between the Six Day War and the Yorn Kippur War. However, it is not necessarily said when and how the United States expressed its pro-Israeli stance. This study will clarify that the Johnson administration created the watershed to formulate America’s pro-Israeli policy in the aftermath of the Six Day War, by analyzing America’s reaction to the USS Liberty incident.

Furthermore, this author will point out that the Johnson administration did not actively display a pro-Israeli stance, but indirectly dictated policy under pressure which led to the drastic transformation of the Middle East. The administration decided to downplay the attack before Americans gathered all available information. This was because the Johnson administration managed to control the Israelis who were taking an aggressive stance against the Arabs in the peace negotiations. The motive here was to avert the Soviets’ further involvement in the Arab world and to alleviate tensions between Arabs and Israelis. However, in terms of the context of history, the Johnson administration’s policy over the USS Liberty incident deepened the U.S.-Israeli relationship, resulting in the United States’ formulating a pro-Israeli policy in subsequent decades. Although the Johnson administration’s aim was to create peace in the region, the decision of deepening relations with Israel eventuated that the Arabs would resort to seeking assistance from the Soviets, consequently furthering America’s involvement in Arab-Israeli conflicts.

In the author’s note of her first postmodern novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita refers to the French Jewish anthropologist and scholar Claude Lévi-Strauss. As a young anthropologist in Brazil in the 1970s, Yamashita may have reflected herself on Levi-Strauss, who viewed Brazil through a minority perspective.

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest was completed while Yamashita was struggling to write her historical novel Brazil-Maru (1992). This novel was planned to be finished before Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. The story behind these different styles of novels reveals Yamashita’s laborious efforts in portraying Japanese colonial subjectivity in Brazil. What she saw in Brazil were colonialists who developed their own business by destroying the nature in Brazil and not Japanese immigrants as a repressed minority group, as she recognized from her own ethnic roots based on internment experiences.

Thus, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest features Yamashita’s Japanese American understanding of the Japanese immigrant in Brazil. Yamashita presents Kazumasa Ishimaru as the protagonist in the novel who is a young Japanese immigrant with a plastic ball floating a few inches above his head and is unable to assimilate into the Brazilian society. Because of his dysfunctional physical characteristics, critics view him as a postmodern antihero who is a dehistoricized character and thus represents the unrepresentable. Against the current criticisms focusing on Kazumasa’s postmodern dysfunction, this essay explores Kazumasa’s inability to assimilate in terms of it representing an autonomous immigrant subject belonging to the multiethnic nation of Brazil. Focusing on Kazumasa’s nickname “a Japanese Santa Claus” and his charitable acts, the essay analyzes the gift economy discussed by Levi-Strauss in his 1952 article, “Burned-out Santa Claus” and attempts to view Kazumasa as an actual historical representation of Japan in the 1990s. Levi-Strauss, in this article, criticizes France accepting American economic support through the Marshal Plan enacted after WWII but later blaming the United States for its capitalistic influence on the nation. Santa Claus, according to Levi-Strauss, portrays separate non-Christian elements that are not assimilated into a Catholic nation―the modern immigrant icon of American capitalism and the pre-modern ritual of nature worship. The U.S. supporting France parallels the support Japan received in the 1990s under “the New Marshall Plan”. By calling Kazumasa “a Japanese Santa Claus,” Yamashita adopts and embodies the act of giving, by reconstructing Levi-Strauss’ narrative of Santa Claus within this postmodern novel.

The essay first analyzes how Levi-Strauss’ “giving theory” is reflected in Kazumasa. The main purpose of this essay, however, is not to simply analyze Levi-Strauss’ influence on the novel but to investigate Yamashita’s intention of presenting a transnational Japanese subject whose inability to assimilate into the society eventually becomes a subject of criticism of postcolonial Brazil, which had been radically Americanized during globalization.

This article examines the descriptions of the atomic bombings against Japan in the U. S. history textbooks. In particular, it focuses on historical contexts of the bombings, and clarifies how an understanding of or a debate on the bombings is framed. In order to do that, this study analyzes thirty-nine textbooks that are/were used in American secondary schools.

According to the historical research, this article assumes that the historical contexts of the atomic bombings are World War II, the Cold War, and the nuclear age. Most of the history textbooks deal with World War II and the early Cold War in different chapters. On World War II, domestic matters and foreign issues are dealt with in separate sections. On foreign issues, the history textbooks incline to mainly describe military developments on the European front and the Far Eastern front. No history textbook deals with the nuclear age in a single chapter, and some recent textbooks describe it in a section or a head. Based on these facts, this article argues that the U. S. history textbooks in general do not consider the Nuclear Age as an important historical context.

Then, where is the description of the atomic bombings placed? Most of the textbooks locate the description in a chapter about World War II and a section about the ending of the war or about the Pacific front, not the Cold War. This is the case with not only the military aspects of the bombings, but also the political aspects. Based on these facts, this article suggests that the history textbooks regard the bombings as a military tactic, and unquestionably connect the bombings with the ending of the war. Some recent textbooks point out the political aspects of the bombings, but they do not provide an adequate context.

On the connection between the atomic bombings and the nuclear age, about a half of the textbooks that this article uses say that the bombings ushered the nuclear age. However, as stated above, the nuclear age is not considered as a historical context, and it is only two textbooks that explain the significance of the bombings in the nuclear age. Moreover, almost no textbook clearly connects the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the image of the annihilation of the human beings in the nuclear age.

As a result of the above analysis this article concludes that the U. S. history textbooks have a tendency to locate the atomic bombings in the context of World War II, especially in a military context. Historian Andrew Rotter points out that there is simplicity in the debate over the atomic bombings in the United States. This study suggests that the bombings in the textbooks reflect and affect this simplicity.

On his way back to America in 1854, after the completion of his mission of opening Japan, Commodore Perry visited Nathaniel Hawthorne in Liverpool, where the writer was working as US consul. Perry asked Hawthorne to compile his travel journal and other materials for publication, which Hawthorne declined. Hawks eventually undertook this task and Narrative of the Expedition of American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, in the Years of 1852, 53 and 1854 was published in 1856. Few critics have paid attention to Perry’s initial choice of Hawthorne, whose works often fictionalize historical events drastically. Focusing on the parallel of peculiar “meteors” depicted in Perry’s Narrative and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, as well as the texts’ providential discourse characteristic of nineteenth-century America, this paper elucidates links between Perry, Hawthorne, and the opening of Japan.

Perry’s Narrative records a strange meteor in the entry for July 8 in 1853. It reports a “meteor” with a red wedge-shaped tail and unusual brightness. For this, Perry says that ancient people would regard it as a good omen for national enterprise, and prays for God’s blessing for his mission. This echoes a scene in The Scarlet Letter where a meteor draws a letter “A” in the sky and the narrator explains it in terms of the Puritan belief in Providence. Indeed, these meteor scenes share the providential discourse that claims God’s special plan for American enterprise. However, the Narrative’s description of the “meteor” is scientifically questionable, and Perry most likely dramatized the event to create the impression of a God-given mission.

Political parties utilized this rhetoric of God-given mission as well. Hawthorne sometimes wrote for Democratic campaign as he had close connection to Democrats like O’Sullivan and Bancroft. And these politicians disseminated the providential discourse in the theory of “Manifest Destiny” and the US History, respectively. Hawthorne also compiled Bridge’s African Cruiser, the journal of African Squadron; Perry led this Squadron aboard one of the four black ships that later appeared off the coast of Uraga. Moreover, Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography for Pierce, the fourteenth American president, whose presidency saw Perry’s successful completion of the opening of Japan.

It must be also noted that political parties used literary and historical discourses to disseminate political values. This blurred the border between fiction and nonfiction, even in the case of official documents like Perry’s Narrative as suggested by its title. Meanwhile, Hawthorne attributes his artistry to “the neutral territory.” This idea, predicated on his belief in Providence, underlies his style of dramatizing historical events into fanciful stories. Given Hawthorne’s relationship to contemporary politicians and his literary use of Providence, it is no wonder that his romance and Perry’s journal share the providential discourse.

Though the authoritative rhetoric of Manifest Destiny pressed Japan to open the country for practical and economic reasons, America’s democratic ideals based on the belief in Providence also influenced its relationship to Japan. Perry’s prayer for his mission’s success, for example, attests his own piousness. We can safely assume that Perry first asked Hawthorne to compile his narrative because of the author’s writing style, his relation to the Democrats, and his literary use of Providence in its religious, cultural and political significance to America.

Minority students often have their campus organizations conduct events and activities that help enhance their ethnic ties, confront discrimination, and improve their social status. These activities focus not only on school-related issues, but also on community life in general. They are regarded as one kind of identity politics. This politics has come to signify a wide range of activities based on the shared experiences of injustice committed against certain social groups. The fundamental objective is for minority groups to acquire a positive self-understanding, because they have often been forced to accept a negative self-image imposed upon them by mainstream society.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the identity politics of a college student organization which identifies itself as the Nikkei Student Union (NSU) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to look into what Nikkei means in the US now. The result can offer us some clues to understanding modem Japanese Americans, a unique major Asian group which has much fewer immigrants and achieves a relatively higher social status than other major Asian groups in the US.

The UCLA NSU was founded in 1981 as the first Japanese descendants’ campus organization to engage in identity politics. The most important annual event on campus is “Cultural Night” whose main purpose is to showcase what the members’ culture is and who they are. It consists of a Taiko performance, Odori, skits depicting their lives in the US, and other modem cultural performances such as hip-hop. The club has also played an active role in the community by helping in local projects, such as providing mentors to underprivileged children living in a low-income housing unit in Little Tokyo.

These NSU activities deeply related to identity politics are based on the concept of “Japanese Americans.” It is a framework for Japanese descendants to understand themselves as an American group not Japanese, which has overcome terrible hardships in the US such as internment during World War 2. This concept, which was produced and spread during the Redress movement, promoted Japanese community cohesion.

But the current NSU consists of not only Japanese descendants who are related to internment and the Redress movement but also new Japanese offspring whose parents came to the US after World War 2 and non-Japanese members. After joining the NSU, they learn to understand the differences between Japanese and Japanese Americans and produce a narrative to connect themselves to Japanese American culture and history, influenced by the concept of “Japanese Americans.” Each of the diversified members reconstructs the concept of “Japanese Americans” respectively. That is why Nikkei has several meanings in the NSU.

The NSU has played important roles in identity politics on the basis of a flexible concept of “Japanese Americans” not just for Japanese Americans but for people from other ethnic or racial backgrounds. This case may offer hints about how to surmount the essentialism that identity politics often causes.