Consuming Japan: Cultural Relations and the Globalizing of America, 1973-1993
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CONSUMING JAPAN: CULTURAL RELATIONS AND THE GLOBALIZING OF AMERICA, 1973-1993 A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Andrew C. McKevitt May, 2009 i © Copyright 2009 by Andrew C. McKevitt ii ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the U.S. encounter with Japanese goods in the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that this encounter transformed social and cultural life in the United States by ideologically and materially introducing Americans to their first intense, sustained engagement with the processes of contemporary globalization. The dissertation proceeds thematically, first outlining the ideological transformation of American life. While some groups in the United States interpreted Japan’s ascendency to economic supremacy as a threat to U.S. national power, others, like scholars of international business, imagined Japan as the harbinger of a globalized future of economic prosperity and cultural homogeneity. Popular cultural representations of Japan reflected such understandings of Japan but also addressed the postmodern nature of the Japanese future, framing it as a borderless future in which Japanese corporations limited American political and economic freedoms. The second half of the dissertation examines the material globalizing of America—the U.S. consumption of Japanese goods like automobiles, VCRs, and Japanese animation (anime). The author argues in these chapters that the popular image of U.S.-Japan trade conflict during the 1980s obscures the nuances in the relationship that developed at the local level, where Americans consumed goods that transformed their lives, introducing them to new ways of thinking about the world and interacting with other societies engaged in global economic and cultural exchange. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I like to think of this dissertation as a work filled with big ideas. I cannot claim that those big ideas are all my own. They are the product of years of interacting with a vibrant intellectual community at Temple University. My friends and graduate school colleagues—Kate Scott, David Zierler, Holger Lowendorf, Kristin Grueser, Wendy Wong, and Rich Grippaldi—all read pieces of this work at various points and offered invaluable commentary, often of the informal and candid sort that only friends can share. The chair of the dissertation committee, Richard Immerman, persistently encouraged me to follow my interests and instincts, even when they led well beyond the boundaries of what we usually mean by “foreign relations.” I have told many prospective graduate students that they’ll never find a better advisor. The other members of the dissertation committee, Petra Goedde, Bryant Simon, and Naoko Shibusawa, have each contributed big ideas of their own that have improved this project immeasurably; I’m thankful for their guidance not only on the dissertation but also in becoming a professional historian. I am also grateful for the assistance of Will Hitchcock, who in this project’s earliest stages provided multiple opportunities for me to present my work publicly. Without the love, help, and encouragement of my parents, Linda and Henry McKevitt, I would not have even tried to make it to this point. Finally, I want to thank my best friend and editor, Sarah Hughes. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION – RESURRECTING THE ORDINARY IN U.S.- JAPAN RELATIONS ..............................................................................................1 2. HOW JAPAN WON THE COLD WAR: NARRATIVES OF POWER IN AN ERA OF IDEOLOGICAL CHANGE .............................................................34 3. WAKARIMASUKA: SHIFTING AMERICAN IMAGES OF JAPAN FROM SHŌGUN TO RISING SUN ......................................................................89 4. OHAYO: (GOOD) MORNING AGAIN IN MARYSVILLE ..............................136 5. MEDIA LIBERATION: THE VCR AND CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION .............................................................................................183 6. “YOU ARE NOT ALONE!”: ANIME AND THE GLOBALIZING OF AMERICA, 1977-1989 ........................................................................................223 7. EPILOGUE – BACK TO THE FUTURE: JAPAN IN GLOBAL AMERICA, 2008 .................................................................................................264 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................302 APPENDICES A. ANIME QUESTIONNAIRE ...............................................................................323 v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION – RESURRECTING THE ORDINARY IN U.S.-JAPAN RELATIONS “Culture is ordinary,” Raymond Williams wrote, reflecting upon daily life in the rural farming valley in England where he grew up.1 I suspect that, like Williams’ studies of British culture and society were for him, this project will be as personal to most Americans born after World War II as it has been for me. It is not exceptional that the material presence of Japan has always been a tangible reality in my life. I recall being ferried around in my grandfather's 1984 Toyota Corolla; for my seventh birthday, I received a Nintendo Entertainment System, an interactive device that came to dominate after-school activities to the detriment of my studies; my family regularly gathered around our first VCR, a bulky Panasonic, to watch the latest movie releases in the comfort of our home; reared on American food heavy in calories and light on subtlety, it took a herculean effort of epicurean openmindedness to get me to try, and enjoy, sushi as an undergraduate; today I drive a Toyota, own several electronics gadgets imprinted with the Sony label, and, like the 25,000 people with whom I attended the 2008 Otakon anime convention and the millions more who watch anime daily on television, I find Japanese cartoons to be more compelling than just about anything the U.S. entertainment industry offers. For me it has never felt unnatural to be surrounded by material manifestations of Japan, and I am not alone. 1 Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope (New York: Verso, 1989): 4. 1 Of course, none of this is extraordinary, and measured against the stories of international change that have dominated news headlines since I was born—from the Iran hostage crisis to the end of the Cold War and implosion of the Soviet Union to the events of September 11, 2001—they seem positively mundane, if not trivial. Yet that so many people could identify with such a personal anecdote begins to make my point: since roughly the mid-1970s the consumption of Japanese products has been a central facet of U.S. social and cultural life, but we lack a place for this story in our narrative of U.S. history in the twentieth century. Current understandings of U.S.-Japan relations during this period, which focus on state-level economic conflict and Cold War security debates, also fail to acknowledge the nuances of this important transpacific exchange. This dissertation argues that it was in those nuances, in the acquisition and consumption of Japanese goods as well as ideas and images of Japan, that the United States experienced its first intense, sustained engagement with the processes of contemporary globalization. Consuming all things Japanese helped create a globalized America, a condition that became so natural—so ordinary—that Japan’s role in that process has been overlooked. This dissertation resurrects Japan’s contribution to the transformation of American life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It does so from multiple perspectives, beginning at the national and then turning to the local and ending with the global. At the national level, a new popular discourse on Japan emerged in the mid-1980s as Americans bought an increasing number of Japanese products and pushed the U.S. balance of payments heavily in Japan’s favor. While this discourse borrowed from older racial discourses of the prewar and wartime years, which 2 portrayed Japan as a premodern society based on subservience to authoritarian warlords, it also incorporated new ideas and images that alternately represented Japan as a futuristic threat or a model of corporate behavior in a globalized world. Cross-cultural representations are never fixed; they can shift rapidly to accommodate changing socioeconomic realities, as both John Dower and Naoko Shibusawa have illustrated for previous periods of U.S.-Japan relations.2 New ideas do not replace old representations. They are added to the well of cultural images from which cultural producers can draw, creating hybrid images that are often pastiches of old and new ideas. For example, U.S. propagandists during World War II appended the concept of the Japanese as subhuman animals to the nineteenth-century images of Japan as a militaristic warlord society, generating images of gorillas clad in military or samurai uniforms. Within weeks of Japan's surrender, however, new patriarchal attitudes mixed with animalistic imagery to produce representations of Japan as an adorable simian that Americans needed to protect and nurture.3 The potential for viewing Japan through racial binoculars remained after the war and occupation. But in the post-civil rights, post-Vietnam United States,