The United States of America became a trans-Pacific empire at the turn of the 19th/20th century, in that it possessed formal colonies, namely Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam and the Philippines. However, it did not mean that they were governed uniformly. Hawaii was “incorporated” while the others were not. The United States citizenship was applied to Hawaii; another type of citrzenship was created for the Philippines and Guam; citizenship of any kind was not granted to American Samoa. Furthermore, the life course of these islands showed different outcomes. Hawaii became a state; the Philippines gained independence; Guam and American Samoa ate unincorporated territories even to this day.

Despite these differences, there were certain commonalities. People intermarried and population became racially and ethnically mixed in each territory. Along with this intermixing, power relations were established around sexuality and race. These characteristics of colonial societies resulted in differences in rights of movement for different Asian ethnicities at different time periods. Starting from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the so-called “aliens ineligible for citizenship” gradually expanded into other Asian ethnicities: Japanese in 1924 and Filipinos in 1934. After they were designated as such, it was prohibited not only to move to the mainland United States but to move from one insular territory to another.

According to John Torpey and Adam McKeown, the modern state controls the movement of people across its borders by checking the traveler’s passport. Torpey further claims that the modern state “penetrates” and “embraces” the society for its own survival and that the state’s monopolization of the legitimate means of movement is an extension of this “embracement.” On the other hand, Toshio Iyotani interrogates the primacy of the modern state as a form of governmentality and insists that it would be more beneficial to see the place from the perspective of movement.

Based on Torpey’s characterizatron but responding to the call of Iyotani, I have analyzed the fine lines drawn among the Filipino people’s desire for movement, the INS rules, and actual responses of the INS office in Honolulu. As a result, two findings were made. First, the INS checked on the identity of the Filipino applicants by testing their testimonies against the network of the existent documents. The applicant needed to prove his own legitimate status. This aspect can be described as a normal procedure in accordance with the characteristics of the modern state. Second, certain laws applicable in the mainland U.S. were applied haphazardly in Hawaii. One was the Cable Act, in which a female American cittzen lost her citizenship by marrying a male “alien ineligible for citizenship.” An American citizen retained her citizenship even after marrying a Filipino but lost it when she married a Japanese. The other was the right of return. A half-Chinese half-Filipino resident was initially prevented from returning to Hawaii. She was able to return only after submitting a “section 6 certificate” as a Chinese “traveler.” Filipinos on the other hand were issued “unofficial reentry permit” prior to departure from Hawaii.

In conclusion, Hawaii showed the characteristics of “contact zone.” The applicant needed to testify to prove his or her legitimacy. Hence, he or she needed to avoid the identification as a “Chinese” or as a member of an undesirable class. At the same time, certain laws were applied so haph azardly that the applicant needed to know which laws were applicable in Hawaii in order to avoid the trap of illegitimacy.

In Cold War America, modernist literature, especially that of William Faulkner, represented its Cold War liberalism and was endorsed by apparently apolitical literary journals including The Kenyon Review, edited by the ex-Southern agrarian and New Critic John Crowe Ransom and sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. This essay attempts to bridge apolitical literary studies in the United States and American studies and American literary studies in post-war Japan. Those disciplines were a cultural alignment that enabled the defeated country to reenter the international community as a friend of the West, or the United States, and functioned within the intertwined complex of politics, the military, economy and culture. We can see one aspect of what Naoki Sakai calls in his The Trans-Pacific Imagination “the formula of complicity between US global domination and Japanese nationality” (7) through the reconstruction of Japanese national culture as a democracy, to which process the introduction of American studies and American literary studies and modernist aesthetics was conducive.

An analysis of the institutional introduction of the American modernist canon and its translation, especially the works of T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner, together with New Criticism and the corresponding transformation of Japanese literature will indicate how those disciplines and cultural products of the U.S. and the post-war introduction of democracy in Japan were instrumental in refiguring Japan as a self-colonizing, or voluntary, “model-minority.”

This paper explores how literary scholars negotiated with the post-war reintroduction of American literary studies, the American modernist canon and New Criticism, and how that process was instrumental in re-casting American literary studies as fundamental to the Cold War cultural alliance of the United States with Japan. The first section outlines the cultural occupation and cultural diplomacy of the United States in post-World War II Japan in terms of reintroduction of American literature to Japan through book programs of Civil Information and Education section of GHQ/SCAP during the occupation and USIS after the Peace Treaty, and then moves on to the analysis of the blueprint drawn by Rockefeller, III in his Report and the very first phase of American studies and American literary studies during the occupation and post-treaty years. Especially the University of Tokyo and Stanford University Seminar for American Studies sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation inspired by the Salzburg seminar was a locus where scholars of emerging American studies and Japanese scholars mutually fashioned American literary studies and at the same time themselves as subjects of the democratic nations. Finally, by analyzing how Japanese scholars focused on learning the discipline and text themselves, the paper shows how they were voluntarily subject to the idea of the “free individual” and inadvertently fashioned themselves as Cold War liberal subjects. Voluntary promotion of American studies and Americanliterary studies in post-treaty years was supposed to help promote a continued cultural occupation, as it were, under the name of cultural interchange.

This article examines the impact of Japanese civil intellectuals’ activities which advocated pursuing socially fair democracy on Japan’s democratic transformation and the U.S. transplantation of the democratic regime to Japan. It was the proposal of dem ocratization based on the dissolution of the privileged peer classes by Tatsuo Iwabuchi, a political commentator, that had some political influence on Japanese democratization in the early stage of the U.S. occupation from civil society. Iwabuchi pointed out the war responsibility of the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, who advised the Emperor. He also persuaded Prince Konoe, who was the highest ranked peer, to renounce his peerage. Then, Iwabuchi committed to make a civil constitution draft, which prescribed to abolish the House of Peers and the Privy Council. His activities which intended to correct the inequality of social position sought a type of democracy that gave priority to the rcalization of social equality.

While the basic framework of previous studies regarding the U.S. occupation of Japan consists of the demands of General Headquarters Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ) and responses by the Japanese Government, this study reexamines it from the following two perspectives, by focusing on Iwabuchi and other Japanese civilian opinion leaders. The first perspective pays attention to the domestic and international impact of the civilians’ opinions for democracy. The second perspective classifies the concept of democracy into several types while it has tended to be regarded as the single unified political idea. From these perspectives, this article argues that GHQ highly evaluated advocating democracy which emphas ized fairness by civil Japanese, and their democracy movement functioned as a catalyst to promote the transportation of the democratic regime from the U.S. to Japan.

This article suggests that the activities that asserted the socially fair type of democracy by Iwabuchi and intellectuals around him contributed to solve the GHQ’s problem of democracy from above. This is because they put GHQ in a position of the guardian for correcting inequality. The role of which Iwabuchi particularly carried out was indicating the direction toward democratic Japan by pursuing the dissolution of the prewar lineage based political system as a breakthrough. This explanation especially fits to the impact of his activities on Japanese social-democratic intellectuals, and indirectly on New Dealers in GHQ. Moreover, to conservative GHQ officers, Iwabuchi’s activities should have impressed the possibility of achieving democracy in Japan by showing the fact that there was a Japanese intellectual who advocated democrattzation by dissolving the lineage based political system. Since the activities by the Japanese civilians including Iwabuchi dealt with the contradictory position of GHQ, it is probable that GHQ decided to refer to their constitution draft. This inference suggests that the idea of socially fair democracy, which was advocated by the Japanese intellectuals with the consideration of their country’s situations at that time, was reflected in Postwar Japan’s constitution based on GHQ’s draft.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how post-war Japan promoted national reconstruction and modernizatron in the light of the continuity or discontinuity of the discourses on America between war period and the Occupation period. Eto Jun pointed out that the censorship by GHQ/SCAP drastically transformed the traditional values of the Japanese, and he designated the Occupation period a “sealed linguistic space,” but the discursive space of the Occupation period should be taken as both liberated and constrained.

“Overcoming the Modern” (Kindai no chōkoku), a round-table talk held in 1942, discussed how to overcome western modernity, but it curiously left the central problem of American modernity almost untouched, simply repeating the widely held assumption that American culture was materialistic and degenerate. On the other hand, several books on American literature published in 1941, unanimously stated that the Japanese should study and recognize American history and culture through reading American literature. This assertion was reiterated in books on American literature published in the Occupation period, except that the authors now identified the future of postwar Japan with that of the developing American literature and culture.

But some Japanese modernist authors―such as Haruyama Yukio (1902-94), Ijima Tadashi (1902-96) and Shimizu Hikaru (1903-61)―who were active in the 1930’s and had faced restrictions on their intellectual freedom and expression, perceived the essence of the problem from a different angle. For them, the Occupation period was not necessarily synonymous with a closed linguistic space. They were well aware that postwar Japan had to take a detour to reexamine the possibilities and limits of the Western modernism, instead of simply seeing Americanization equating modernization.

Simizu was a scholar of American literature and visual culture who believed in “mechanical beauty” (kikai bi). In 1920s and 30s he published books and articles on cross-genre studies between American literature and cinema and photography, and in the Occupation period he edited two magazines in Kyoto: Eiga Geijutsu (Cinema Art, first published in 1946) and Amerika Bungaku (American Literature, 1948-49). Amerika Bungaku was charactertzed by its perspective of American literature as spreading beyond the boundaries of its original culture. From 1920s to 30s, the poet and translator Haruyama Yukio edited two famous modernist magazines: Shi to Shiron (Poetry and Poetics) and Serupan (Serpent). He applied the editing policy of Serupan to Ondori Tsushin (Cock Report, 1945-51) and made the latter one of the most popular general magazines in the Occupation period. He was maintained his pre-war transatlantic viewpoint of American culture and his political stance of non-communism and liberalism.

These modernists, confronting problems Kindai no chōkoku neglected or made light of, regarded American popular culture as a “negative medium” (in Hanada Kiyoteru’s words) and questioned what kind of modernization postwar Japan needed while it lay in America’s shadow. When Haruyama was forced to resign as chief editor in 1946 on account of the purge of public service personnel by SCAP and Shimizu’s Amerika-Bungaku ceased publishing, the linguistic and literary space in Occupied Japan, devoid of its post-modern possibilities, was partially closed in a manner that was different to Eto’s view.

This study discusses Native American people’s current attempts to preserve memories of tribal sovereignty through the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, NHPA (as amended through 1992). The paper focuses on the Northern Cheyenne tribe which has been one of the most active native entities in terms of registering their sacred sites and battle sites as the National Historic Sites (NHS) and the National Historic Landmarks (NHL).

In the late 19th century, the Northern Cheyenne tribe fought the Indian Wars. In the mid-20th century, they reclaimed their sacred land, the Black Hills, through the Indian Claims Commission. At the time of the Indian Termination Policy (the 1940s and 1950s), the tribe defended their reservation by establishing the Tribal Land Acquisition Program. During the national energy crisis of the 1970s, they fought against energy conglomerates, successfully canceling the unjust coal lease agreements. The study views the tribe’s current efforts to register tribal memories as national historic sites, as a way to preserve integrity of their homeland as well as to argue against U.S. national history.

In the 1980s, Native tribes defended their sacred sites using the Free Exercise Clause, but lost cases to land developments. One of the federal/administrative responses to these court decisions was the 1992 NHPA amendment which mandates federal agencies to consult with Native tribes in order not to damage their sacred sites. Since the Civish case (2004) declared the historical importance of the Native’s sacred sites, the amended NHPA has encouraged the Native people’s efforts to preserue their land and heritage. The Sand Creek Massacre NHS, the Rosebud Battlefield NHL, and the Wolf Mountain Battlefield NHL are some of the sites which the Northern Cheyenne tribe successfully registered as the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). While the protection of the NRHP is promised by U.S. National Park Service (NPS), the tribe’s motives behind the NRHP applications varies; in some cases, to protect the integrity of the reservation by guarding the surrounding area, and in other cases, to keep tribal memories alive in order to compose a history from their point of view.

The NPS has a history of removing Native tribes from the area designated as National Parks, and now they are willing to embrace some of the tribal memories as a part of U.S. national history. While so far, outcomes of the negotiation between the two parties has been favorable to Native tribes, the NPS’s scope for the NRHP is still limited, mostly to battle sites. It is uncertain as to what extend the NRHP effectively functions as a means for the Native tribes to defend their land. For the Northern Cheyenne tribe, the historical interpretation of the Sand Creek Massacre has been under negotiation with the NPS, and the site’s General Management Plan is still a work-in-progress. The Native tribes’ efforts to register tribal memories as the NRHP continues to pose a deep question to the national narrative of the United States.

This article investigates how Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area began forming a movement in the 1990s and early 2000s that demanded the Japanese government to issue an apology and reparations to the victims of the war crimes committed by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s.

In the early 1990s, protesting the Japanese government’s revision of history textbooks and some Japanese leader’s denial of the Nanjing Massacre, Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area began commemorative events for victims of Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s. These activities of collective remembrance led to the formation of an organrzation called the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War. As its name straightforwardly indicates, the organrzation aimed to excavate, maintain, and educate “the truth” of the Japanese invasion in China, while another goal was to demand that the Japanese government issue an apology and reparations to the victims. The members who had experienced or whose parents experienced the atrocities committed by the Japanese military during the war actively engaged in public education and support of academic research, and created a global network among organizations with the same goals by forming the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia in 1994.

The organization’s endeavors for public education bore fruit in the political arena when a conference by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia inspired California State Assembly member Mike Honda to introduce Assembly Joint Resolution (AJR 27), which urged the Japanese government to formally issue an apology and reparations to the victims of the war crimes. Honda, a Sensei who experienced the Japanese American internment during World War II, explained that based on the success of the Japanese American redress movement he had learned that an apology and reparations would heal victims’ wounds. He also emphasized the significance of this process of healing to the Asian American community in his district, which was divided by divergent memories of the war. Similarly locating AJR 27 within the history of Asian American activism, such as the Asian American movement and the Japanese American redress movement, other members of the community, including those who formed the “Rape of Nanking” Redress Committee (RNRC), supported Honda and his resolution. AJR 27 was passed in both California State Assembly and Senate in 1999.

Formed by Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans and emphasizing its Asian American panethnicity, the RNRC not only demanded the Japanese government to issue an apology and reparations to the victims of the war crimes, but also criticized U.S. foreign policy for blocking the demand toward the Japanese government based on the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Its criticism was clearly articulated when it organrzed with the Asian American studies program at the University of California, Berkeley a counter-conference against the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the treaty supported by both the Japanese and U.S. governments in 2001. Whereas Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka and Secretary of State Collin Powell celebrated the treaty for providing peace and prosperity in Japan and the Pacific alike, the participants at the conference posed an opposite view that the treaty had harmed international relations in the region. In addition, they demanded that the Japanese government issue an apology and reparations to the victims and the U.S. government to stop supporting the peace treaty.

Thus, Asian American in the San Francisco Bay Area advanced a movement to demand the Japanese government to issue an apology and reparations for war crime victims by placing their endeavors in the tradition of Asian American activism and developing a panethnic Asian American identity.

It had been 54 years since President John F. Kennedy cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961. On December 17th, 2014, both US President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced that they would start normalization talks. Why was President Obama able to go forward with the normalization talks? Moreover, why was it possible to proceed then but not previously, and why was it impossible to do so earlier? This article analyzes the momentum behind normalization and the perceptions of President Obama and other domestic and international actors based on Kenneth Waltz’s three-image framework: the stances of particular statesmen and political leaders such as state leaders, the domestic makeup of states, and the anarchic structure of the international system.

This article shows that US normalization of relations with Cuba was realized at three different levels. With regard to the first level, the personal level, President Obama has continued to support reconciliation with Cuba since he was a senator. In his first term he was forced to spare his resources in order to pursue other domestic policies for the sake of his own presidential and his party’s congressional and mid-term elections.

At the domestic level, the second level, public opinion among Cuban-Americans and US citizens overall has drastically changed and improved. Therefore, in contrast with previous presidents who tried to improve relations with Cuba, President Obama found the foundations already in place to regard reconciliation with Cuba as his "legacy." While traditional Cuban-American groups such as CANF struggle to attract new liberal Cuban-Americans, some new liberal Cuban think-tanks and groups have worked on agendas and policy recommendations aimed at reconciliation with Cuba.

In the third image, the international system level, this article notes that the circumstances surrounding the two countries changed a long time ago. Cuba’s military and geographical importance has declined since the end of the Cold War and 9/11. Within the United Nations, almost all nations disagree with the US economic sanctions against Cuba, while even nearby Latin American countries tend not to expect Cuba to become a democratic country. On the other hand, the general public and Cuban-Americans have long been fearful of and cautious with respect to the Castro regime. The early Cuban-Americans in particular put pressure on the US Congress, so that for a long time US presidents were not able to normalize relations with Cuba.

Therefore, while the conditions of normalizing relations with Cuba gradually become ripe at the second level, where public opinion and immigrant communities have recenly changed, and at the third level due to the transformation of security architecture and other international pressures, the critical push came at the first level, where President Obama’s ideas and beliefs were keys.

After World War II, the Cold War began and anti-communism prevailed in the United States. Almost all Americans saw the Cold War as an ideological battle between “freedom” and “communism,” and they devoted themselves to praising “freedom” and the “American way of life” without much reflection. American conservative Christians were typical critics of communism.

Conservative Christians thought communism was not only God’s enemy but an American enemy. For example, fundamentalist Carl McIntire believed that the Cold War was “the battle between freedom and tyranny,” and so stressed “the business of Americans to lead the World into freedom.” But we should not think that all conservative Christians criticized communism in a similar way. In contrast to McIntire, evangelical Billy Graham saw a positive role for communism although he was considered a forceful anti-communist.

Graham was conscious of his calling as an evangelist. As an evangelist he preached the Gospel and challenged people to turn to Christ in repentance and faith through crusades, radio, TV and books. Some theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr regarded Graham’s messages as problematic because he optimistically believed that conversion was the sole remedy to all the problems in the world.

However Graham was no optimist for he emphasrzed,the doctrine of original sin. In Peace with God (1953), Graham refers to Genesis and indicates how Adam committed the sin of trying to become king instead of obeying God’s law. And so Americans, who are offspring of Adam, also have sin and their “freedom” is not perfect. Compared to a nationalistic Christian like McIntire, Graham realized that American freedom was imperfect as was communism. In World Aflame (1965), moreover, Graham developed his analysis of sin and described the paradox of man: coexistence of goodness and sin.

In addition to developing his theology, in World Aflame, Graham emphasized that the Last Judgement will be carried out soon. As an evangelist, Graham hoped that Americans would accept the Gospel message, repent and lead a Christian life, while at the same time he realized,that humans were too weak to give themselves up to God. Finally Graham made a decision to use the controversial word “Communism.” He referred to communism as a religion that asked the question “What is man?” Graham hoped that Americans would repent and come to faith while they contemplated this question posed at them. He recognized that communism was God’s instrument encouraging Americans to repent.

Reading Graham’s books carefully, we can see that he was not an all-out anti-communist like McIntire. Graham relativized, “freedom” from the perspective of the doctrine of original sin, and as an evangelist, understood communism as God’s instrument to persuade Americans to repent. But conservative Christians failed to understand Graham’s analysis of sin and evaluation of communism although they listened to Graham’s messages. Nationalistic Christians wanted Graham to be a leader of anti-communism. The image of Graham as an “anti-communist” was a result not onlv of his behavior but also mass nationalistic desire.