A01=Eijun Senaha
A01=Hiroshi Kitamura
A01=Ikue Kina
A01=Katsunori Yamazato
A01=Mari Yoshihara
A01=Mariko Iijima
A01=Masumi Izumi
A01=Naoko Wake
A01=Sanae Nakatani
A01=Yohei Sekiguchi
A01=Yu Tokunaga
A01=Yujin Yaguchi
A01=Yuko Itatsu
American Studies & Japan
Americanists in Japan
Author_Eijun Senaha
Author_Hiroshi Kitamura
Author_Ikue Kina
Author_Katsunori Yamazato
Author_Mari Yoshihara
Author_Mariko Iijima
Author_Masumi Izumi
Author_Naoko Wake
Author_Sanae Nakatani
Author_Yohei Sekiguchi
Author_Yu Tokunaga
Author_Yujin Yaguchi
Author_Yuko Itatsu
Category=N
Category=NH
Category=NHF
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
life writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780824890049
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 150 x 226mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jul 2022
- Publisher: University of Hawai'i Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Unpredictable Agents, twelve Japanese scholars of American studies tell their stories of how they encountered "America" and came to dedicate their careers to studying it. People in postwar Japan have experienced "America" in a number of ways—through literature, material goods, popular culture, foodways, GIs, missionaries, art, political figures, celebrities, and business. As the Japanese public wrestled with a complex mixture of admiration and confusion, yearning and repulsion, closeness and alienation toward the US, Japanese scholars specializing in American studies have become interlocutors in helping their compatriots understand the country. In scholarly literature, these intellectuals are often understood as complicit agents in US Cold War liberalism. By focusing on the human dimensions of the intellectuals’ lives and careers, Unpredictable Agents resists such a deterministic account of complicity while recognizing the relationship between power and knowledge and the historical and structural conditions in which these scholars and their work emerged. How did these scholars encounter "America" in the first place, and what exactly constitutes the "America" they have experienced? How did they come to be Americanists, and what does being Americanists mean for them? In short, what are the actual experiences of Japan’s Americanists, and what are their relationships to "America"?
Reflecting both the interlocked web of politics, economics, and academics, as well as the evolving contours of Japan’s Americanists, the essays highlight the diverse paths through which these individuals have come to be "Americanists" and the complex meanings that identity carries for them. The stories reveal the obvious yet often neglected fact that Japanese scholars neither come from the same backgrounds nor occupy similar identities solely because of their shared ethnicity and citizenship. The authors were born in the period ranging from the 1940s to the 1980s in different parts of Japan—from Hokkaido to Okinawa—and raised in diverse familial and cultural environments, which shaped their identities as "Japanese" and their encounters with "America" in quite different ways. Together, the essays illustrate the complex positionalities, fluid identities, ambivalent embrace, and unpredictable agency of Japan’s Americanists who continue to chart their own course in and across the Pacific.
Reflecting both the interlocked web of politics, economics, and academics, as well as the evolving contours of Japan’s Americanists, the essays highlight the diverse paths through which these individuals have come to be "Americanists" and the complex meanings that identity carries for them. The stories reveal the obvious yet often neglected fact that Japanese scholars neither come from the same backgrounds nor occupy similar identities solely because of their shared ethnicity and citizenship. The authors were born in the period ranging from the 1940s to the 1980s in different parts of Japan—from Hokkaido to Okinawa—and raised in diverse familial and cultural environments, which shaped their identities as "Japanese" and their encounters with "America" in quite different ways. Together, the essays illustrate the complex positionalities, fluid identities, ambivalent embrace, and unpredictable agency of Japan’s Americanists who continue to chart their own course in and across the Pacific.
Mari Yoshihara is professor of American studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
