Chapter IV-1 - Griffis in Tokyo

This paper tells a story about my life as an anthropologist who is both “native” and “alien” to Japanese society. I am a native in that I was born to Japanese parents of prewar generation and was raised within a “genuine” Japanese family in Sendai, Japan. I consider Sendai home, where I now live and work, and I love the city in its entirety. I strongly identify myself with the people and culture of Sendai city and Tohoku region of Japan. I am also an alien, however, in that I spent two years of my early life from five to seven years old in Buffalo, New York, USA, which fact tuned me into a “returnee kid.” I later spent altogether five years at Michigan State University studying anthropology. I am doubly “Americanized.” I acquired American language and habits early on and I absorbed American anthropology in my early adulthood. Both became part and parcel of my way of life. As a result, I constantly oscillate between being a native and being an alien, between acting—as a native or an alien—and watching all that as an anthropologist. In this paper, I shall examine several episodes in which my native side collides with my alien side under the watchful eyes of my anthropologist side and discuss what that all means to me and potentially to anthropology as a discipline.

The International Journal of Asian Studies, 2009

Laura Nenzi's Excursions in Identity is a well researched and extremely insightful book that vividly illustrates the ways in which travel afforded individuals in Edo period Japan the opportunity to transcend the everyday, engage idiosyncratically with landscape, and refashion their very identities. This book is a significant contribution to a growing body of English language scholarship on travel in early modern Japan, one that is especially welcome because her focus on the experience of the individual traveler makes it complementary with prior studies. Nenzi offers a "bottom-up" view that adds a new perspective to Constantine Vaporis's study of the sociopolitical infrastructure regulating travel in his Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 1994). Like Jilly Traganou's The To¯kaido¯Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), Nenzi is concerned with the range of ways in which journeys and the sites encountered en route may be given meaning, but she does not approach these representations at the level of the "social subjectivities" that frame Traganou's analysis. Insofar as she examines the individual's travel experience, Nenzi's approach is similar to Herbert Plutschow's A Reader in Edo Period Travel (Kent: Global Oriental, 2006), which offers a series of detailed portraits of male travelers and their journeys along with a provocative argument about the development of "Tokugawa enlightenment." Yet Nenzi's approach is more synthetic and thematic than Plutschow's; also setting her work apart is an attention to the gender of the travelers and consideration of many travelogues by women.

Japan Studies Review, 2021

Welcome to the twenty-fifth volume of the Japan Studies Review (JSR), an annual peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the Asian Studies Program at Florida International University. JSR remains an outlet for the Southern Japan Seminar and encourages submissions from a wide range of scholars in the field. The 2021 issue features interdisciplinary scholarly works in traditional and contemporary Japanese studies. This volume contains four articles, starting with a textual and philological analysis by Steven Heine based on his original translations of Zen Buddhist poems written mainly in early medieval Japan in kanbun (Sino-Japanese) style. This article is titled, "Selections of Zen Buddhist Poetry in Kanbun Reflecting Early Medieval Cross-Cultural and Cross-Sectarian Trends." The following article, "Embodied Survival and Demythologization in Kirino Natsuo's Tokyo Jima" by Juliana Buriticá Alzate, examines embodied, gendered experiences relating to survival from a feminist perspective, debunking myths in the novel as it disengages from the essentialized, naturalized, and idealized versions of womanhood. The third article, "Making Movies for the Chinese: Japanese Directors at Manying" by Yuxin Ma, surveys the Manying cinema industry of 1937-1945 from the perspective of Japanese directors producing national policy films for Manchukuo with the competing objective of serving Japanese imperialism and entertaining the local Chinese viewers. The last article, "Ishikawa Tatsuzō and Shimazaki Tōson: Two Writers/Travelers to South America in the Eye of Imperial Discourse" by Matías Chiappe Ippolito, compares divergent viewpoints regarding South America from two twentieth-century Japanese writers' travels to Brazil and Argentina and their respective literary works in light of Japan's emerging imperial discourse. This issue also has two essays. Kinko Ito and Paul A. Crutcher, in "Swallowtail Butler Café: Cosplay, Otakus, and Cool Japan in Contemporary Japan," provide sociological observations about the popular themed Swallowtail Butler Café in Tokyo through content analysis of online media resources gathered during the Covid-19 pandemic. Daniel Métraux, in "Jack London's Positive Portrayals of the Japanese in His Early Fiction Defy His Reputation as a Racist," offers insight on Jack London's appreciation for Japanese culture with commentary from two of his stories to argue against race hatred attributed to the author at the turn of the twentieth century. There are four book reviews with varying topics.

2015

Western) students at a Japanese university, and have found it to pos sess many excellent features as an introduction to modern Japanese culture. The book was compiled mainly for the undergraduate, who will find the well-researched range of material of an appropriate level of complexity. The articles, all of which have been published previously, cover a wide range of subjects, from mountain asceticism to factory ritu als, and take a variety of approaches, including the historical ， textual, empirical, and theoretical. This range is part of the book’s strength, allowing it to provide considerable factual detail about many aspects of contemporary Japanese culture while simultaneously offering a his torical perspective (as in its presentation of important documents from the Meiji era and the American Occupation). The editors have succeeded in putting together an interesting and useful book that will generate many questions among an enthusiastic class and encourage further reading on con...

相愛大学研究論集 the Annual Report of Researches of Soai University, 1994

Kileole"sha : Japan's Returnees superwomen/men or cultural refugees forever tormented by the dissonance of their inbetweenness? Once again in the limelight of public attention, the issue of Japan's kileokushal kikolezcseilleileoleushi'o seems destined for yet another transformation of image, reflecting Japan's national identity problems and her difficulties in finding a place in the world. As a barometer of national feeling and sentiment, attitudes towards the returnees, especially as they are manifested through the educational system, are a significant reflection of what the Japanese think of the alien and the different in their midst as well as how they see themselves and their own identity in the world. Perhaps the most controversial group of returnees are those who have had schooling in North America. It is the members of this group who have presented the most difficult and most unexpected challenges to Japan's rigid cultural order. Their treatment suggests how conservative, conformist, and exclusive Japanese society can be in the face of pressures to internationalize. These returnees have quite literally forced a national examination of fundamentally-held values, first with regard to the educational system and recently, as many of them have begun jobs, in the workplace .2 A familiar topic of discussion in Japanese society, kikokuseifkikokushijo have been viewed alternatively as mentally-handicapped, linguistically-deprived, or culturally-stunted. The most widely-accepted educational solution has been to isolate them in special schools and classes. One might think such students, whose parents are in the overseas vanguard of Japan's economic success, would be regarded as an added plus in Japan's continuing international success, yet despite rhetoric, official and otherwise, describing returnees as welcome, for most Japanese they have been an anathema, an alien phenomenon. For those returnees who are adults, the alternatives are simple: hide/down-play one's experience (except within one's own support groups of other returnees) or stay overseas.

Japan Forum, 2025

This article considers photographs of Ainu, between 1871 and 1909, analyzing representations by Japanese, European and American photographers. The article discusses how Ainu were positioned as Others, not just in the Japanese imagination, but also, in comparison to the American and European images that circulated in Japan during that period. Japanese authorities followed the American model of taking over the 'Wild West', acquiring new lands, laying railroads and promoting intensive agriculture, while relating to the Ainu as 'primitive' and 'disabled', making them vulnerable and exploitable. This approach led to the occupation of territories, enslaving of Ainu men through the labour of modernisation, dislocating Ainu women and children, relating to them as 'foreigners' who do not belong to Japanese society, therefore, need to be transformed through Japanese and missionary educational activities in Hokkaid o. Complementary to this depreciatory approach, Americans (and Europeans) served as the role model for Japanese modernisation. Many Japanese (sometimes indirectly, not in the image, but through the photographer), admired and were eager to follow American models and associate themselves with that culture, while the Ainu served as a counter-model of the unworthy and inappropriate, thus, proving Japanese superiority. The article, therefore, moves between the disparaging representations of the Ainu, and the admiration of the Americans, with aspiration to become similar to them, using methods such as the recruitment of American advisors by the kaitaku-shi (Capron et al), marriage (Nitobe Inazo), and the use of Protestant missionaries as educators (Batchelor et al). Further, I discuss how Japanese officials adopted Western approach of superiority, directly treating the Ainu as lowly and incapable, as in the image taken in Kuril Islands.

Rethinking the Early Atlantic World @* 2014 EARG Colloquium * Reflections on the Mirror: "Victorian" Japan With Modern Cultivators, Missing Links, and Toy People As Oscar Wilde argued, Japan was "a pure invention" (Wilde 53). Wilde's remarks targeted at his contemporaries whose love for Japanese object d'art prevented them from distinguishing the Japanese themselves from figures etched in Japanese cultural commodities explicitly criticize the Victorian tendency to reify the Orient by reducing it to commodity kitsch that obscures the societal realities in which such beloved objects were produced and imported. And Wilde was indeed, right. Borrowing Wilde's extraordinary term, I argue that this invented Japan we find in Victorian literature reveal more about the Victorian episteme and their world picture (weltbild) than the material realities of Japan. Even those who recognized the forceful hand of Japanese modernization enterprises and witnessed the brutal violence such modern apparatuses resorted to in due course of achieving their goals of modernizing Japan, such as Isabella Bird, were reluctant to look beyond the surface of Japan. Nor were they willing to delve into the complex political realities of Japan that involved not only Japanese and Europeans, but also indigenous peoples who suffered the consequences of Japan's 'progressive' transformation into a junior Empire. By stressing the savagery of the Ainu (indigenous peoples inhabiting Hokkaido, which was colonized by Japan, whom Bird argues must be the "missing link") in comparison with the Japanese, Bird reveals that her definition of a modern man hinges on his ability to tame nature for his own uses, while erasing the political, social, and economical reality of Japan. Despite the very modern qualities of Japan Bird features in her travelogue, however, the much beloved image of Japan as a timeless country is repeatedly invoked by writers like Rudyard Kipling who portrayed Japan in his journalistic letters during his travels in 1889 as a country still inhabited by toy-like people, a land whose virtue lies precisely in its pre-modern nature. As seen in the two different portrayals of Japan indicates, Japan in the Victorian mind oscillated between the junior Empire whose drastic overhauling of their once despotic social structures both threatened as well as fascinated the Western audiences and the Elysian toy-shop full of souvenirs. However, both images are inventions designed, as this paper will explicate, ultimately to justify imperial violence, and/or to educate subjects of British Empire of their own superiority, rather than to give us, as Isabella Bird noted in her other "Oriental" travelogue, a "truthful impression of the country" (Yangtze Valley and Beyond viii).

Doshisha American Studies

Ethnohistory 51, 751-778, 2004

Impressions, no. 33 (Spring 2012), pp. 55-69.

“Lessons from the One-Mat Room: Piety and Playfulness Among Nineteenth-Century Japanese Antiquarians.” Impressions, no. 33 (Spring 2012), pp. 55-69.