The Reception of American Literature in Japan during the Occupation (2024)

Book Program under Cultural Occupation

When Japan was placed under the control of the Allied Powers in September 1945, the “United States Initial Post-Surrender Policy Relating to Japan” that was issued on August 22, 1945, by the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) stated that the basic aim of the military occupation was demilitarization and democratization, and to that end, reorientation and re-education of Japanese people and culture were considered instrumental, an approach that the SWNCC had already conceived of before the initial post-surrender policy.1 Unlike in Germany, whose occupation was divided up among Allied Powers, the Japanese Allied occupation was conducted unilaterally by the United States. The General Head Quarters (GHQ), under the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur, was practically in charge of remodeling the defeated country. As, according to the initial policy document, it was “not the responsibility of the Allied Powers to impose upon Japan any form of government not supported by the freely expressed will of the people,” it was necessary for GHQ to inculcate and regulate among the Japanese “a desire for individual liberties and respect for fundamental human rights, particularly the freedoms of religion, assembly, speech, and the press. They shall also be encouraged to form democratic and representative organizations.”2 Shortly after the occupation began, the Civil Information and Education (CIE) section was established in GHQ by General Order No. 183 of September 22, 1945. The Order defines the function of the section as the promotion of democratic culture: “to expedite the establishment of freedom of religious worship, freedom of opinion, speech, press, and assembly by dissemination of democratic ideals and principles through all media of public information.”3

The cultural policies of GHQ/SCAP corresponded with those employed by the United States in West Germany and Austria. The GHQ/SCAP controlled the output of Japanese media during the occupation period through censorship. The discursive space under this censorship was designed to disseminate and promote ideas of democracy and freedom through American cultural items such as books, translated books, magazines, newspapers, radio, and motion pictures. Modeling its program after the Information and Education Exchange Program of the State Department, which had started in the late 1930s, the CIE administered cultural programs via the various media of radio, press and publications, motion pictures, people-to-people exchange, and libraries, in liaison with the Civil Censorship Detachment that was in charge of censorship. Under this system, ideas promoting democracy, freedom, and the equality of both sexes were disseminated. To achieve what the “United States Initial Post-Surrender Policy” ordained, to create “a desire for individual liberties and respect for fundamental human rights,” GHQ initiated a project to fundamentally change the Japanese people’s way of thinking, and eventually to transform Japanese culture.

With regard to American books, the CIE adopted the program originally devised by the State Department and employed by the Office of War Information (OWI) in Europe during World War II. In 1938, the State Department had launched a cultural-cooperation program to promote a friendly relationship with Latin American countries in an effort to block Nazi Germany’s influence in that region. The program consisted of travel and study grants, exchanges of professors and books, establishment of U.S. cultural centers such as libraries and schools, and distribution of motion pictures.4 As the threat of Nazi Germany grew, the initial U.S. aim of friendship and understanding underwent a transformation: books became “weapons” that should be mobilized to defend against the fascist threat. The libraries established by OWI in European countries during the war had collections that focused on “information for rehabilitation and reeducation” determined by whether a specific country was one of the Allies, neutral, or an enemy.5 After the war, these overseas libraries were placed under the control of the Interim International Information Service, then transferred to the newly established Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs of the State Department except for those in the occupied countries of Germany and Japan.6 As the Cold War developed, the objectives of those libraries changed again to the promotion of a “full and fair picture” of American democracy, and then to a “campaign of truth.”7

American books in overseas libraries formed part of U.S. foreign policy and reflected what the United States wanted to show to foreign countries: “a representative picture of North American life to the intelligent layperson in other countries.”8 Usually there were book lists prepared by specialists such as librarians of major libraries, the American Library Association (ALA), or the Library of Congress. The ALA was involved in the book program conducted by the State Department and was commissioned to compile lists of recommendable books for European and Latin American countries. They drew up the Selected List of Books in English by U.S. Authors, which listed 1,279 titles, and the Selected List of Periodicals Published in the United States, which included 480 publications recommendable for the collections of overseas libraries.9 The main source that was instrumental in creating the Selected List of Books in English by U.S. Authors was Interpreting the United States (1942, 1943), which was also influential in forming the initial collection for CIE.

If book lists register the transformation of the canon of American literature, Interpreting the United States was characterized by the dominant 1930s appreciation of literature: New England writers, romanticism, realism, and hardly any modernism. The novels and short stories section included, for example, writers of the 19th century such as James F. Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, and many 20th-century writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, and T. S. Stribling. Many of the 20th-century writers listed were ones whose names would become obscure when the modernist canon became dominant. Interpreting the United States also listed bestselling books: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, Drums along the Mohawk by Walter Edmonds, and The Yearling by Marjorie K. Rawlings. The names of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or F. Scott Fitzgerald were not yet to be found (though William Faulkner appeared in the 1942 list). The list was also marked by the New Deal. It included the works of progressive writers, many of whom were involved in the Popular Front movement, and the works of multi-ethnic writers. The drama section in particular featured progressive playwrights, as well as works by the African-American writers Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston, the last of whom would soon be harshly criticized by Wright and fade from memory until the 1970s. There was a section titled “American Regions and Their Cities,” which contained volumes of the Federal Writers’ Project’s American Guide series.

If Interpreting the United States was a product of the New Deal, another ALA list, Books Published in the United States 1939–1943: A Selection for Reference Libraries (1945), was imbued with the modernist turn of the American literary canon, with numerous modernist poets’ works, including those of T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens. Many of these heavily overlapped with the entries in Sixty American Poets, 1896–1944, compiled by the modernist poet and New Critic Allen Tate, then serving as consultant in English poetry for the Library of Congress under Archibald MacLeish. Books Published in the United States 1939–1943 eliminated Works Progress Administration (WPA) writers, installing instead newly emerging literary critics such as Kenneth Burke and John Crowe Ransom, as well as Norman Forester, who was instrumental in establishing major themes in American literary studies in the Modern Language Association (MLA) in the 1920s.10 Also distributed were Overseas Editions, a series of books commissioned by OWI for overseas libraries, and Armed Services Editions for distribution among the U.S. military. Both series were selected by the Council on Books in Wartime.

It is in this context that American literature, the literature of a former enemy, was re-introduced into occupied Japan. The CIE instituted twenty-three information libraries, the shelves of which were occupied by magazines and books tuned for Cold War cultural policies, a selection that reflected the selection for U.S. libraries overseas and was considered suitable for re-educational purposes. For those who could not read English, GHQ/SCAP launched a translation program in 1948.11

Distribution of American Literature through GHQ Book Programs

American books were disseminated under the control of the CIE, first through its libraries and then through the translation program, as well as the Gift Book Program for Japanese schools. The CIE Library (later, CIE Information Library) was one of the first venues for American literature after the war. The first CIE library was opened on November 15, 1945, in Tokyo, with the aim of “supply[ing] Japanese public, editors, and writers with reference and background material on the war, international affairs, and American life in order to assist in carrying out the democratization of Japan in accordance with established policies of the Supreme Allied Commander.”12 The CIE was connected with the Office of International Informational and Cultural Activities of the State Department, and the library was “patterned after Information Libraries established by the former OWI.”13 Indeed, there was a special book list, “Publications for Occupied Areas.”14

However, the difficulty in obtaining books made their collection look rather random at first. The New York field office of the army’s Civil Affairs Division was unable to successfully collect and send appropriate books to Japan.15 The collection that eventually developed somehow approximated the designated book list, consisting of many items occurring in both Interpreting the United States and Overseas Editions. Reference books in various fields made up a large part of the collection. What can be gathered from the CIE weekly reports that partially recorded their newly acquired books is that in March 1946, of approximately 1,500 holdings, titles concerning American literature numbered about 100 and included George Washington Cable, Old Creole Days; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Erskine Caldwell, Stories by Erskine Caldwell; Norman Corwin, Thirteen and Short Stories from New Yorker; Emily Dickinson, Poems by Emily Dickinson; Henry James, The Great Short Novels of Henry James; Samuel Clemens, Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Owen Wister, The Virginian; Willa Cather, My Antonia and O Pioneers!; O Henry, The Best Short Stories of O. Henry; Ellen Glasgow, The Barren Ground; John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, The Moon is Down, and Of Mice and Men; Conrad Richter, The Trees; Upton Sinclair, Wide is the Gate, Presidential Agent, Between the Two Worlds, World’s End, and Dragon’s Teeth; Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms; Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth; Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Countee Cullen, Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties; W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy; Constance M. Rourke, American Humor; Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag; An Anthology of Pulitzer Prize Poems; The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers; Dorothy Canfield, The Bent Twig and Seasoned Timber; Walter D. Edmonds, Drums Along the Mohawk; and Marjorie K. Rawlings, The Yearling. Some of the titles concerning American literary studies included Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds; Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of American Drama; George Santayana, The Last Puritan; F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance; Vernon Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought; and Van Wyck Brooks, Roots of American Culture. There were also the Federal Writers’ Project American Guide series.16

In short, the American literature that the library projected to Japanese readers mainly consisted of 19th-century classics; New Deal liberalism represented by authors often affiliated with the Popular Front; WPA series, along with Constance Rourke and African-American writers; middlebrow literature affiliated with the Book of the Month Club17; literary studies before the modernist turn, such as those by Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Parrington, the latter of whom would be thoroughly criticized by Lionel Trilling in his influential work The Liberal Imagination; and emergent American studies symbolized by Kazin and Matthiessen, both of whom would represent the United States at the Salzburg seminar on American studies in 1947.18

Distribution of American Literature in the Private Sector

The CIE library and translation programs were not the only channel for American literature to be re-introduced into postwar Japan. Soon after the war, numerous periodicals were launched, most of which were ephemeral. Also there was a newly established specialist book store dealing in American books and used book stores that sold Overseas Editions and Armed Services Editions not meant for trade.

Among the short-lived magazines, there were at least some that were conducive to disseminating American literature. One example is Ondori Tsūshin (Weather-co*ck I see all), with the subtitle “Sekai no Bunka Nyūsu" (Cultural news from around the world), the first number of which dates to November 1945, the month the first CIE library opened. Staff members gathered information through international shortwave broadcasts and any periodicals they could obtain. They were anxious to present the latest trends in foreign literature, be it American literature, Soviet literature, or whatever, as they had not been allowed to import books from foreign countries since around 1939.28 The magazine actively introduced foreign literature of various genres newly released in the United States and other countries; Hollywood movies; and political and social trends in the United States, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. Contributors ranged from academics, including Masami Nishikawa, who later became one of the founding fathers of American literary studies in Japan, and Tōtaro Hosoiri, one of the leading scholars of American literature, to writers and translators such as Ranpo Edogawa, a mystery writer, critic, and introducer of foreign mystery stories; Yukio Haruyama, the editor during the early years; Jinnichi Uekusa, a famous connoisseur of jazz and movies; the poet and translator Nobuo Ayukawa; and the famous translators of popular fiction Ken Nobuhara (who later succeeded Haruyama as chief editor) and Kazuo Inoue. For seven years, the magazine disseminated American literature and useful information about it, such as descriptions of terms and events like the Pulitzer Prize, and information about accessible magazines and the availability of Armed Services Editions at used book stores in the Kanda area of Tokyo. Another example is the journal American Literature published by a Kyoto-based publisher, Kōtoshoin. It lasted only two years but enjoyed contributions from prominent scholars of American literary studies, including Masaru Shiga, who published his book on American literary history in 1947 from this publisher; Tōtaro Hosoiri; Takashi Sugiki, who later became president of the American Literature Society of Japan (ALSJ); and Tomoji Abe.

In addition, a Japanese poetry magazine, Arechi (Waste land) (1947–1949), inspired by T. S. Eliot, was launched, with Ryūichi Tamura and Nobuo Ayukawa as core coterie members. The wide-ranging contributors included the English literary scholars Kenichi Yoshida, Junzaburō Nishiwaki, and Shōzō Kazima. As the title of the magazine suggests, they were inspired and influenced by T. S. Eliot in their criticism and taste. Many of the contributors were also committed to translation including the genre of mystery. Kindai Bungaku (Modern literature) (1946–1964) also actively introduced modern literature. Many of the contributors had been involved with proletariat literature, but contemplating the way intellectuals should be, they endorsed the idea of the free individual.29 Young scholars of American literature such as Shōichi Saeki, Kenzaburō Ōhashi, and Yoshiaki Fuhara contributed articles. American writers mentioned during the first several years were Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Eugene O’Neill, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Ernest Hemingway. In 1951, Yoshiaki Fuhara published an essay to report on New Criticism and its significance in securing the freedom of literature and literary scholars from restrictions by outside factors, and in 1954 there appeared feature articles under the title of “Essays on American Literary Studies” contributed by Saeki on Hemigway, f*ckuo Hashimoto on Steinbeck, Masao Takahashi on Faulkner, Shinichi Segi on Dos Passos, Yokichi Yamanouchi on Caldwell, Ōhashi on Ralph Ellison, Tatsu Hattori on Henry Miller, and a broad overview by Ōhashi.30 Most of these people later became very influential in institutionalized American literary studies.

Besides these magazines, foreign books were available at book stores and used book stores. A former U.S. military officer, Charles Tuttle, founded a book store and publishing house in Tokyo in 1948, after being discharged from the CIE. He also acted as a bridge between GHQ/SCAP officers and Japanese publishers. The company imported American paperbacks, newspapers, and magazines for the use of U.S. forces (later the company also played a key role in translating Japanese literary works, for example, Yasunari Kawabata, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and Yasuo Mishima).31 Used book stores were also places where young scholars could pick up paperbacks. In his memoirs, Kenzaburō Ōhashi, who would later become a leading Faulknerian and president of the ALSJ, delineates his first encounter with titles of the Armed Services Editions at a bargain book store. Among the first books he acquired were Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre. He was totally overwhelmed by the rich imagery of The Grapes of Wrath, and that experience triggered his interest in the United States.32 Kenji Inoue, who introduced multifarious books through his translations and also took up the position of ALSJ president, mentions how his reading experience of Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold and The Long Valley in Armed Services Editions turned him toward American literature. He also read the journal American Literature issued by Kōtoshoin and Ondori Tsūshin to learn about contemporary American literature during the occupation, when people were still not allowed to order books directly from the United States.33

Under the control of GHQ/SCAP, there were thus various ways for American literature to circulate. Its acceptance was multifaceted, some with despair, others with joy, or others mixed feelings, depending on their experience of the war and defeat. Accordingly, although the evaluation of American literature often generally shared what would be called the Cold War consensus, it did not mean unconditional acceptance, often inflected by personal experience of war. Individual scholars of those days still leave much to be explored.

Development of American Literary Studies

The period of the U.S. occupation decisively effected a momentous change for American literary studies. The field itself ceased to be a secondary one annexed to English literary studies and became a field with its own themes to be elucidated. A further study of the deployment of cultural politics during the transitional period from GHQ/SCAP and its CIE section to the United States Information Service (USIS) provides a picture of how the initial goal of the occupation was effectively operative.

In prewar Japan, because American literary studies were regarded as secondary to English literary studies, scholarship had been sporadic. In the midst of the sudden proliferation of American literature after the war, American literary studies in Japan incorporated largely what was achieved in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s. Seminars in Tokyo sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, seminars in Kyoto by Kyoto and Dōshisha universities, and the summer seminar conducted by the USIS had a decisive influence on the development of the field. After the peace treaty of 1951, the cultural occupation in terms of American literature employed a more sophisticated and tacit operation through the institutionalization of American studies and American literary studies.

Since the Meiji era (1868–1912), especially since the late 1880s, works of American writers such as Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Henry Longfellow, and Mark Twain, and later Pearl Buck and Margaret Mitchell, had been translated into Japanese and acquired a substantial readership. American literature had also been taught at universities, with Lafcadio Hearn being the first to give lectures on the subject at the University of Tokyo in 1898. Yet it had long been assigned a secondary status to English literature, as in the United States,34 and it was not until 1927, when Matsuo Takagaki published the pioneering Amerika Bungaku (American literature), that it came to be recognized as a field in its own right. This almost coincided with emerging American literary studies in the United States. Takagaki, who had studied at the University of Chicago and was knowledgeable about the development of American literary studies of the 1920s, introduced the view of American literature as a full-fledged field to be explored, already sufficiently developed to be independent of English literature.35 His work, including editing a series of English and American literature, was also marked by his concern about the social and historical conditions of literary works, as well as by his interest in literary works concerning the social conditions of human beings such as those by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Upton Sinclair, and the aesthetic value of a literary work itself. Sketching how American literature was received around 1930, Masami Nishikawa divides literature into two categories: the artistic school and the proletariat school. The first was represented by modernist poets, who were introduced especially by Yukio Haruyama and Motohiro f*ckase; the second consisted of, for example, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Floyd Dell, John Reed, and Dos Passos.36

Takagaki was followed by a group of scholars including Takashi Sugiki, Masami Nishikawa, Masaru Shiga, Naotarō Tatsunokuchi, and Tōtaro Hosoiri. Before, during, and just after World War II, they were the leading figures in the field, their names appearing in the ephemeral magazines as well as in a major and prestigious Japanese journal of English literature, Eigoseinen (The rising generation), which was first published in 1898 and survived the war. The years between 1946 and 1951 saw a proliferation of scholarly works on American literature, including Tōtaro Hosoiri, Amerika Engeki Dokuhon (Reader of American plays); Takashi Sugiki, Amerika Bungaku Shiron (Essays on American literature); Masami Nishikawa, Amerika Bungaku Nōto (Notes on American literature); and Masaru Shiga, Amerika Bungaku no Tenbō (A survey of American literature), Amerika Bungaku Josetsu (An introduction to American literature), and Emerson.37

The occupation period was crucial to the development of the discipline of American literary studies. Information pouring into Japan for the first time after the long interval was filtered through GHQ/SCAP. Scholars responded in individual ways to the cultural realignment, and gradually what Nishikawa called the artistic school, or literature other than what was epitomized by proletariat literature concerning social conditions, acquired primary interest. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Japanese scholars turned from the former classics, such as Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (1929) and Russell Blankenship’s American Literature as an Expression of the National Mind (1931), to Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds (1942) and F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941).

The major Japanese journal of English literature mentioned earlier, Eigoseinen, registers this transition. In the first issue after the war, an essay declared the need to restart efforts to get to know the United Kingdom and the United States, and expressed regret over how little English scholars had previously known about those nations. The issues of the next few years conveyed information about titles available at the CIE library or through Armed Services Editions, instructions on how to order American books through GHQ and CIE, and new trends in American literary studies. Contributors often referred to The Kenyon Review, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, as an important source. New names such as Lionel Trilling or John Crowe Ransom and a new term “New Criticism” were introduced, though thedetails of the names and the term were still unknown.38 Scholars of English and American literature who were sent to the United States under the sponsorship of Government Aid and Relief in the Occupied Areas (GARIOA) and then the Fulbright program encountered the classics of American studies and New Criticism, and returned to Japan to promulgate them.39 Major books on New Criticism were published: first, Kazuo Ogawa, Amerika Bungaku ni Okeru Shinhihyō (New Criticism in American Literature) in 1954, and then New Criticism Gairon (Introduction to New Criticism) in 1964. New Criticism Gairon’s author, Toshihiko Kawasaki, says in its introduction that interest in New Criticism was shared even by scholars and teachers of Japanese language and literature.40

Before the introduction of this term, the new critical way of scrutinizing literary text itself was advocated as early as 1947 by Nishikawa, who thus distinguished himself from earlier scholars such as Takagaki, who had been concerned about social conditions and highly evaluated novelists such as Upton Sinclair, who treated social problems. This shift in emphasis entailed reformulation of the literary canon, which overlapped the Cold War consensus canon that privileged literary modernism and 19th-century romanticism and devalued Sinclair and Dreiser along with Parrington. One of the moments that drove this transition into the post-treaty years was the Tokyo-Stanford Seminar in American Studies sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Nishikawa was one of the participants and later formally founded the first American literature program in Japan in 1962.41

Seeing the success of the Salzburg Seminar in American studies, Claude A. Buss of Stanford University, who was an expert in East Asian studies and had collaborated with Archibald MacLeish on Fortune magazine’s special number “Japan” in 1944, proposed a similar seminar in Japan to General MacArthur, in order to establish American studies in Japanese universities. The next year, 1950, the University of Tokyo and Stanford University Seminar in American Studies sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation was launched and continued until 1956. Every year, five American scholars from various fields were invited, and 593 Japanese Americanists participated during these seven years and disseminated what they learned all over the country.42 It was during the same period that the American Studies Association was founded in the United States (in 1951). The discipline of American studies was formulated concomitantly with active involvement of the founding scholars in the Cold War cultural programs overseas such as the Salzburg seminar, Tokyo seminar, and Fulbright exchange program. American literary studies, which, through the work of the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Society, New Critics, and other scholars, had strived to acquire a status equivalent to that held by English literary studies, was also deemed integral to American studies, constituting an important part of the seminar.43

In the field of American literature, Leon Howard (Northwestern University) in 1951 and 1954, Perry Miller (Harvard University) in 1952, Henry Nash Smith (University of Minnesota) in 1953, Harry Levin (Harvard University) in 1955, and Mark Schorer (University of California, Berkeley) in 1956—founding fathers of American studies and American literary studies, who were also invited to teach in Europe—were invited to the University of Tokyo Seminar to hold a series of lectures on American literature.

What was transferred to Japanese scholars of American literature showcases scholarly trends in the United States, consisting of the mainly 19th-century canonical works advocated by the so-called myth and symbol school of American studies scholars, and of modernist works highly evaluated by New Critics. According to the report by Nobuyuki Kiuchi published in Eigoseinen (The Rising Generation) in 1955, Levin used as the textbook A Little Treasury of American Poetry (1948) edited by Oscar Williams. This anthology is significant in that the book, together with A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (1946), clearly reflected the modernist turn in the American literary canon. The very specific meaning of the term “modernism,” with T. S. Eliot as its prime exponent, was first advocated by The Fugitive (1922–1925), a poetry magazine of the American South, and was then brought to England by the poets Laura Riding and Richard Graves, resulting in their coauthored Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927); the term was then appropriated back in the United States in the Treasury, forming what Langdon Hammer calls “shared enterprise” between poets on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.44 Modernism in this vein has a limited scope. If modernism broadly designates artistic movements that stemmed from reaction to modernization, whether celebrating the new and rejecting tradition, or vice versa, what is supposed by modernism in the post–World War II era is marked by, in the words of Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, “the movement towards sophistication and mannerism, towards introversion, technical display, internal self-skepticism,” as an artistic reaction to “formal crisis” and “a crisis of culture” caused by modernization. These qualities are associated with such novelists and poets as Henry James, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, André Gide, William Faulkner, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens.45 By virtue of their concentration on aesthetics, there was an agreement that “modernist artworks were self-contained,” inducing the notion of modernism as “apolitical” during the Cold War.46

In his lectures, Levin gave readings of poems by Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Edgar Lee Masters, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Stephen Crane, William Carlos Williams, John Crowe Ransom, Archibald MacLeish, W. H. Auden, and others—that is, primarily modern poets. What impressed Kiuchi most was Levin’s close reading: he demonstrated explicatory reading of poems line by line, and clarified meter and techniques. Kiuchi stresses the importance of reading the text itself. There is another short report by an anonymous author K. T., who witnessed the transformation of history-oriented American studies into a closer relationship with the formalist methodology of American literature through Levin’s account of how literary criticism had “return[ed] to text” and induced the prevalence of New Criticism as a reaction to the dominant “didactic, historical” way of reading.47 Henry Nash Smith declared that the mainstream of American literature was pessimism represented by the genealogy of “Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, James, Eliot, Hemingway, and Faulkner . . . and Parrington and Steinbeck are a past trend.”48 Both Smith and Miller had been involved in overseas programs of American studies: Smith lectured on the American West for the Salzburg seminar in 1948, and Miller was sent to Leiden in 1949–1950 by the Fulbright program.49 The impact of the seminar was so wide-ranging and decisive that at the time hardly anyone was left unaffected by it.50 There was also the Nagano American Literature seminar program, sponsored by the U.S. Embassy during the years 1953–1956, culminating in 1955 with William Faulkner.51

The Kyoto summer seminar in American studies, whose complicated trajectory is detailed by Takeshi Matsuda, was also influential, held regularly over a long period (1951–1987, except for 1953). It was first held by Kyoto University and Dōshisha University; was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation for several years; and provided a venue for scholars in the area covering Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. As the seminar was planned as a separate project from the Tokyo-Stanford seminars, different lecturers were invited. In the field of American literature, those invited included John T. Flanagan of the University of Illinois, R. A. Jelliffe of Kobe University, Burton E. Martin of Tōhoku University, and Robert H. Grant of Dōshisha University.52

These seminars and The Rising Generation magazine constituted the loci of American literary studies. The latter journal functioned as a channel of dissemination of newly acquired knowledge and approaches. With the limitation of the number of books and available sources, what Gene Wise calls the “substantive consensus on the nature of American experience, and a methodological consensus on ways to study that experience” were substantially constructed in Japan as well as in the United States, and shared among Japanese scholars with the help of those prominent professors who were influential in establishing what Donald Pease calls the “Cold War consensus” of the field.53

Presenting and Studying Quintessential American Literature

After the Treaty of San Francisco of 1951 and the end of the occupation, the next year during the Korean War, when a U.S.–Japan alliance was being advocated, the CIE program was transferred to the auspices of the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency. Just before the treaty, John D. Rockefeller III came to Japan assigned by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles with the mission of drawing up a blueprint for a cultural policy. Rockefeller produced an outline of post-treaty cultural policies for Japan in April 1951. The objective of what he called “cultural interchange” consisted of bringing the two peoples together to foster their mutual understanding as a “two-way street” instead of being “unilateral and patronizing,” and this would “require full and voluntary cooperation from the Japanese.” 54 He proposed the interchange of people including scholars, leaders, and students; the establishment of a cultural center and an international house; and the interchange of cultural materials including books both in the original and in translation, music, scientific laboratory equipment, etc. These programs, according to Rockefeller, would require “the establishment of various organizations or agencies for the conduct of the program,” including the establishment of an American Studies Association in Japan, in order to promote “a deeper understanding of the United States and its culture—particularly its philosophy, its institutions and above all its moral and spiritual values.”55

Rockefeller’s blueprint was ultimately realized. To further its end after the treaty in the fields of American books, American literary studies, and American Studies, two publications were issued and distributed free to educational institutions by USIS and the Office of Cultural Exchange at the U.S. Embassy, respectively. These were instrumental in consolidating the literary canon.

One of the publications was Beisho Dayori (Monthly Review of American Books), which commenced in March 1953. This magazine, written in Japanese, was a book guide with a monthly U.S. bestseller list, the clear goal of which was to promote Japanese translation by introducing a suitable selection of books, thus succeeding the CIE translation program. The preface of the magazine professes, “It is necessary for both Japan and the United States to have a deep understanding of each other’s culture in order for both countries to work together to realize world peace,” and to achieve this understanding, a systematic, instead of sporadic, selection of American books, especially literature and social science books for translation, was important.56 The June 1953 issue, for example, featured nineteen books, including Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination. The author of the article on Trilling’s book offers a tentative Japanese title, and after explaining that it is a book on liberalism in literature and freedom of the spirit and imagination, categorizes the book as educational and scholastic.57 The magazine also published essays on translation and contemporary U.S. literature by leading scholars of American literature including Katsuji Takamura, Naotarō Tatsunokuchi, Junzaburō Nishiwaki, Masami Nishikawa, and the famous translator Hanako Muraoka; their essays were in tune with the policy of the magazine and advocated the necessity of systematic translation of American literature. Nishikawa, for example, deplored the way American literature was introduced to Japan, as it was done mainly by translating bestsellers and much-discussed works and was far from systematic, without providing an idea of what American literature as a whole was like. He proposed a collection of carefully selected literary works.58 When William Faulkner visited Japan in 1955, the magazine featured his speech in its original and in translation.59

The other publication was also a monthly journal, Amerikana (Americana), first issued in October 1955. Every number consisted of about ten translated scholarly articles originally published in “50 highly evaluated academic journals that range from humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences,” so that Japanese academics could learn about the academic attainments of American scholars.60 It featured major American scholars and authors including Carl Becker, Walter Lippmann, and Hans J. Morgenthau, and the journals included Yale Review, Foreign Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, and so on. In the field of American literature, journals such as American Literature, Kenyon Review, PMLA, and Sewanee Review were major sources that provided articles on Melville, Pound, Eliot, James, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, and so forth. As in the Monthly Review of American Books, Japanese scholars contributed short essays on trends in American literary scholarship, thus helping establish the discipline.

By presenting what to read and how it should be read, these monthly magazines were instrumental in fostering Mr. Rockefeller’s ideal: “a deeper understanding of the United States and its culture—particularly its philosophy, its institutions and above all its moral and spiritual values.”61

Both monthly magazines shared an indifferent, detached attitude toward American literature and American studies, as shown in Amerikana’s message on the inside cover, which declares their academic essays to be “selected on a purely academic basis regardless of the diplomatic policy of the U.S.”62 This “purely academic,” apolitical nature demarcated the disciplines of American studies and American literary studies and their institutionalization and dissemination in the schema of the dichotomy of democracy versus communism. Indeed, newly canonized modernist literature, as well as literature of the American Renaissance, was a weapon of the Cold War. As Greg Barnhisel contends, by embracing literary works as an autonomous entity with their own aesthetic style and technique and “divorcing an artist’s biography—and political beliefs and activities—from critical discussion of that artist’s work,” it became possible to confer a privileged status to depoliticized modernist works to counter “the Soviet Union’s official literary and artistic doctrine” of socialist realism.63 This reformation of modernism tuned for Cold War cultural rhetoric is what Fredric Jameson calls “the ideology of modernism,” and it was New Criticism that helped that ideology emerge.64 In the schema of the “free world” versus the totalitarian Soviet Union, Greg Barnhisel argues, concepts of “free” and “independent” constituted “the heart of Cold War modernism, which framed modernist art and literature as the epitome of Western—in particular American—cultural values . . . modernism was an expression of freedom, individualism, self-motivated enterprise, and the end of ideologies—in other words, an expression of Cold War liberalism itself.” Aesthetic artworks were also deemed to be self-contained and independent, things that needed to be “judged solely on the success of [their] own internal structure and logic,” and thus “art works and aesthetic experience were separate from other realms of human activity.”65

Transpacific Alliance and American Literature

American literary studies and American studies were constructed by those scholars, many of whom, whether knowingly or not, also assumed the role of academic individuals in the shared schema of the “free world” versus totalitarianism. Yasaka Takagi, one of the founders of the American Studies Association in Japan in 1946, was instrumental in inviting the American studies seminar to the University of Tokyo, and was highly conscious of this dichotomy: whether people were “governed by democratic ideals or a communist one” was “decisive in the reconstruction of Japan,” and realization of the goal of democracy presupposed the evocation of the idea of the individual.66 Masami Nishikawa, the founder of the course in American literature in the English Department of the University of Tokyo, was inadvertently involved in the apolitical politics of the Cold War era when he proposed in a 1949 article that American literary studies in Japan should be re-established by “reading texts as exactly as possible . . . and questions we have while reading must be resolved by our own efforts.”67

Both see a disconnection from prior scholarship. Nishikawa dismisses the fad of American literature before the World War as merely a phenomenon brought about by inaccurate understanding of American literature and underscores the necessity of proper appreciation.68 Likewise, Takagi, recognizing the fact of defeat, fiercely posits postwar Japan as a newly instituted democracy, repudiating the past. Considering “Japanese reconstruction is nothing other than regeneration and new life,” now that “Japanese people have shed their past beliefs and norms, . . . the mission of American studies is to fairly and accurately analyze and evaluate the heritage of Western culture whose essence is America.”69 In their hope of attaining “mutual understanding,”70 they willingly or unwillingly played the role of model postwar Japanese and carried out what the Rockefeller report stressed as being necessary, that is, “full and voluntary cooperation from the Japanese . . . to have maximum effectiveness.”71 At this point, they brought about an understanding of the occupation such that, according to Harry Harootunian, it could be described by scholars of Japanese studies as a process of modernization and not military intervention.72

Such an honest and voluntary way of learning and embracing American literary studies as well as American literary artworks was thus conducive to the deployment of postwar Japanese intellectuals as model Asian subjects, or a model minority, in the complex of the political, economic, and military network, or in the continuum of the postwar occupation program already proposed in Fortune’s Japan issue in 1944, which said “Japan’s basic postwar problem is a way of life. . . . the problem is a vast one of cultural reorganization; we can provide the opportunity, but only the Japanese can do the work.”73 Similarly, National Security Council Paper 48/2, which laid out the basic strategic principles for Japan in 1949, clearly states: “Any association formed must be the result of a genuine desire on the part of the participating nations to cooperate for mutual benefit in solving the political, economic, social and cultural problems of the area.”74 When the Rockefeller report emphasized the importance of “the initiative of the Japanese” and proposed that the cultural program “must never allow itself to become unilateral and patronizing” but “a two-way street” to obtain “mutual understanding and cooperation,” it clearly shared the idea of NSC 48 that “the association . . . must operate on the basis of mutual aid and self-help in all fields so that a true partnership may exist based on equal rights and equal obligation.”75

In his essay “The Reischauer Memo,” Takashi Fujitani analyzes how the memo, or proposal, written in 1942 by a leading scholar of Japanese studies and later U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Edwin Reischauer, about the use of the Japanese emperor and Japanese Americans after the war was incorporated in the occupation plan and how Japanese studies was operative in generating a racially charged “framework to refigure ‘Japan’ as the U.S.-inspired, capitalist model for other non-Western nations of the world,” with Japan “as a junior partner.”76 The Rockefeller report, which was finished with the aid of Reischauer, entwined this asymmetrical distribution of apparently de-racialized, but indeed racialized sovereign power, introducing an implicit asymmetry in the concept of “two-way” or “mutual understanding.”

Considering that area studies, including Japanese studies, originated in the United States with a view to national defense, the fact that it was a South East Asian specialist, Claude A. Buss, who planned the University of Tokyo and Stanford University American studies seminar is a noteworthy aspect of the institutionalization of American studies and American literary studies in Japan.77 Voluntary promotion of American studies and American literary studies in post-treaty years promoted a continued cultural occupation, as it were, under the name of cultural interchange. The scholars inadvertently embodied the principle of free individuals and molded themselves into Cold Warriors by their voluntary participation in constructing the national discourse of “free subjects.” In this sense, these disciplines were operative in the deployment of what Fujitani in his Race for Empire calls “the governing of self-governing,” drawing on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, or “how governing is thought about and how power is exercised in the modern period,”78 and is thus inadvertently complicit in forming mutually figured subjects as Americans and Japanese in the post-treaty years.

The reintroduction of American literature and American literary studies should be seen in the continuum of the military, the political, the social, and the cultural, and there is still much to be explored, including how Japanese scholars individually responded to and negotiated with this framework, what the shared experience among scholars of other countries has been (especially those of other Asian countries under the shadow of the United States), and how this reintroduction in turn contributed to the formation of U.S. American literary studies.

Discussion of the Literature

Studies of policies and the transformation of Japanese polity during the occupation era have a long history, but it is only rather recently that the cultural aspects in relation to and in the context of U.S. governance and foreign policies have come to be included in the scope of such research. This area of interest has developed since the emergence of a new generation of Cold War studies pioneered by Stephen J. Whitefield, Alan Nadel, and other scholars as the critical reexamination of the Cold War developed toward its end in the late 1980s.79 A new recognition of the importance of cultural, informational, and educational policies intertwined with U.S. military strategy has produced a substantial amount of interdisciplinary studies including Kenneth Osgood’s study of psychological warfare waged by the Eisenhower administration, works by Giles Scott-Smith and Peter Coleman on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and Penny M. Von Eschen’s illuminating studies on jazz as appropriated by the State Department program, as well as works by Naoko Shibusawa and Christina Klein on Cold War Orientalism, which emerged as a re-figuration of oriental representation mobilized to undergird the U.S. military deployment.80

This development has inspired a series of scholarly works on Japanese culture under the occupation in the larger framework of the Cold War and its culture. They have shed new light on the cultural policies programmed and conducted by the United States, and the hegemonic negotiation between those programs and the Japanese. Works by Fumiko Fujita, Takeshi Matsuda, and Watanabe Yasushi on the cultural programs of the GHQ share the problematic of how the cultural policies were conducive to the reconstruction of Japanese society as an ally of the West. Matsuda in particular addresses how those policies were functional in refashioning or resubjectifying the Japanese. Kenji Tanigawa examines the motion picture program of the CIE Section of the GHQ, and Yuka Tsuchiya explores the process of the construction of a pro-U.S. Japan through the U.S. information and education program during the occupation.81 These works are marked by their treatment of cultural policies as crucial to the reconstruction of postwar Japanese subjectivity.

In the field of American literature, whose history in Japan as a discipline began in the 1930s, the analytical framework of “the occupation era” that emphasizes American literature and American literary studies as part of U.S. cultural policies, a vantage point induced by rather recent insights into Cold War culture and the Americanization of American literature, did not emerge until this century. Seminal essays by Takaki Hiraishi and Takayuki Tatsumi, and Kazuko Takemura address the peculiar social condition of “postwar” and its importance.82 These essays inspire scholars to explore the political aspect of American literary studies, the operative function of learning how to read American literature, and how the complex relation of each scholar to U.S. culture and literature was internalized and affected their achievements.

To bring into the scope of research in this area the function of the introduction of American literary studies as part of cultural policies to refigure Japanese subjectivity, the transpacific, geopolitical studies conducted by Naoki Sakai and Takashi Fujitani, to name just two scholars, would provide an effective analytical framework focusing on the asymmetric distribution of power and governmentality. Likewise, it should be noted that area studies, including American studies and Japanese studies, was originally a program that was supposed to contribute to military aims.83 The transpacific standpoint and comparative studies among Asian cases, including those of Taiwan and Korea, would be further conductive to clarifying how American literature and its studies were operative in the Occupation era.