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.