The term Genteel Tradition or Victorianism has been used widely and with various meanings. Genrally, however, it refers to that literature in America from about 1870 to the turn of the century which was molded by the 'polite' manners and rigorous taboos of refined society. In the literary world 'genteel' writers and critics, supported by william D. howells, tried to keep the tradition under the slogan 'Be concerned with more smiling aspects of life' and 'Never, never write anything you would be ashamed to read to women.' And they severely attacked L' Assommoir and other novels by Emile Zola, a founder of Naturalism for the reaso that his works were dirty in description and harmful to healthy youg men and women, When Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser published Naturalistic novel at home, many 'genteel' critics openly attacked them. But their attacks were out of place, because they didn't have clear perception of the social change of that day, nor could they appreciate the real purpose of these young writers. It is certain that the Genteel Tradition waas followed by Naturalism as its antithesis. Therefore, as the former declined in its power at the beginning of 20th century, the latter gave place to muckrakig novels and disappeared. Neither the Genteel Tradition nor Naturalism enjoyed longevity but it is certain that they have left something essentiaal in contemporary literature.

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Kanikōsen was translated into English and published in America and Britain in 1933. The original Japanese version had been written by Takiji Kobayashi and published in 1929.The English version’s tittle was The Cannery Boat by Takiji Kobayashi, and Other Japanese Short Stories. But its translator’s name was not written anywhere in the book.
Unexpectedly, the name was revealed in a Japanese newspaper’s article reporting the roundup of the Japanese Communist Party members in 1934. It was William Maxwell Bickerton that translated Kanikōsen. He was British born and raised in New Zealand and was teaching English at Dai-ichi High School and other colleges in Tokyo. According to the article he was arrested under the Peace Preservation Law by the Tokkō (the Special Higher Police) on suspicion of giving money to the Japanese Communist Party. He told the police about his translation during the harsh investigation.
It was very rare for Japanese modern novels to be translated and published in foreign countries before the World War II. At that time, modern Japanese literature was hardly known in the West, though The Tale of Genji were translated into English in the 1925, which drew praises from many European literary people including Virginia Woolf and other modernists.
Why and how Kanikōsen was translated and published abroad is the theme of this paper. It inevitably has relation to the context of the world politics in the 1930s, especially of the rise of the Communist Movements in Japan and the West. For instance, one of the American Communist leaders, Michael Gold, a Proletarian writer himself, helped Bickerton publish his translation. This kind of political situation in the 1930s, rather than the literary quality and values of the work itself, supposedly urged the overseas translation and publication of the Kobayashi’s proletarian work.

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『沖縄ノート』は、アメリカ軍政下の沖縄への「日本人」の差別的な眼差しを、その自己開示的な表現のスタイルによって可視化した作品として、今日でも高く評価されている。その成立にあたっては、ラルフ・エリスンの『見えない人間』に由来する「多様性」の概念が重要な役割を果たしたと言われている。たしかに『沖縄ノート』は「多様性」をめぐる思考をもとに、緊密に構造化されている。しかしながら、エリスンの「多様性」の概念が冷戦下アメリカの「封じ込め」政策と矛盾を来さないものであることはすでに指摘がある。実際、大江の「多様性」の概念は、冷戦下にアメリカの「identity」を束ね直したとされるユダヤ系知識人の一群-「ニューヨーク知識人」-の言説に直接的な影響を受けている。『沖縄ノート』の表現のスタイルは、ユダヤ系知識人たちの思想的な枠組みを身体化することで獲得されたものなのである。

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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.

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