Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I America, Japan, Okinawa -- 1 Memories of an Okinawan Americanist -- 2 American Paralysis: Floating Homeland, Family, and Masculinity -- 3 On Becoming an Okinawan and a Feminist: My Path to an Americanist Career -- PART II FAMILY TIES -- 4 Learning “America” from the Mennonites -- 5 The Land She Could Never Call Home Again: “America” in My Family History -- 6 Navigating the Sea of Fatherhood across the Pacific -- PART III EMBODIED LIVES, GROUNDED CAREERS -- 7 The Accidental Mirror: The Shine and Shatter of My American Dream -- 8 An Americanist from a Different Shore, and Gazing Back at Japan -- 9 Loneliness, Laughter, and Belonging: A Feminist View of an Asian in America -- PART IV DIFFERENT SHORES, MULTIPLE BORDERS -- 10 An Accidental Historian: My Journey in Research on Japanese North American Community Activism -- 11 An Americanist Who Sees the US from the Peripheries -- 12 Making of a Transpacific Americanist via Latin America: Myself Discovered through Immigration History -- Contributors -- Index

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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.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 01. Dez 2022)